Florence & Giles

In development

Feature Film adaptation of the novel written by John Harding.

1891. In a crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan Florence and her younger brother Giles are neglected by their guardian uncle. Banned from reading, Florence devours books in secret, and twists words and phrases into a language uniquely her own.

After the violent death of the children first governess, a second arrives. Florence becomes convinced she is a vengeful and malevolent spirit who means to do Giles harm. Against a powerful enemy, with no adult to turn to for help, Florence will need all her intelligence and ingenuity to save Giles and preserve her private world. This is her chilling tale…

Praise for Florence & Giles:

'Florence & Giles is an elegant literary exercise worked out with the strictness of a fugue: imagine Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw reworked by Edgar Allan Poe... Nothing prepares you for the chillingly ruthless but inevitable finale’
The Times
   
‘Real atmosphere is increasingly rare in novels and here is it in spades… A tour de force’
Daily Mail

‘The climax is genuinely exciting and shocking’
The Independent

‘A tight gothic thriller… unbearably tense’
Financial Times

‘Brilliantly creepy’
Daily Mirror

‘Thoroughly ingenious and captivating… It’s a scarily good story, in an arrestingly unusual narrative voice’
The Oxford Times

‘Harding winds things nice and taut… brilliant tension where the reader knows something wicked is this way coming, but with little clue as to the direction… The eeriness pervades like a dank fog’
The New Zealand Herald