The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Kate Summerscale’s 2020 ghost novel, will be adapted into a TV series for New Pictures, the producers of Des and White House Farm for ITV, according to Deadline. Writer Charlotte Stoudt and director Minkie Spiro, both of whom worked on FX’s Fosse/Verdon, have begun work on the adaptation.
Summerscale’s novel is set in 1938. Alma Fielding has begun experiencing supernatural events at home, with objects moving and breaking by themselves, even attacking Alma and her family. Alma enlists the help of Nandor Fodor, a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and “chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research” to investigate, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “As the spectre of Fascism lengthens over Europe, and as Fodor’s obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed.”
New Pictures CEO Willow Grylls, who will executive produce alongside Stoudt and Spiro, said she is excited to work with the duo.
“I am thrilled to be developing Kate’s exceptional book with the brilliant Charlotte Stoudt and Minkie Spiro,” Grylls said, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “a story of feminine energy that cannot stay in its place as society dictates with two unique roles at its heart.”
The Haunting of Alma Fielding is currently on the shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize, and Summerscale has won numerous awards for her other books, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008 for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
Currently, Stoudt and Spiro are also working on an adaptation of Karin Slaughter’s 2018 novel Pieces of Her for Netflix that will star Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, Hereditary).