‘Operation Mincemeat’ Producer Archery Acquires Ned Beauman’s Novel ‘Venomous Lumpsucker’
variety.comLeo Barraclough International Features EditorKris Thykier’s Archery Pictures, whose credits include John Madden’s “Operation Mincemeat” and Sky thriller “Riviera,” has acquired the television rights to Ned Beauman’s highly anticipated new novel “Venomous Lumpsucker.” The dark comedy is a madcap adventure story set in a dystopian world ravaged by climate change.The story is set in the near future, when tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year, and a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help preserve the remnants, or just assuage humankind’s guilt (depending how you look at it).Humanity’s last hope is the biobanks, impregnable vaults where the DNA of every organism can be preserved forever, until one day an audacious cyberattack obliterates them in their entirety.
In the aftermath, a troubled conservationist and a crooked mining exec must team up in search of the venomous lumpsucker, a lost fish that they both desperately need to save.
British journalist and novelist Beauman has been nominated for many prizes including the Booker and Desmond Elliot prize and has won a few, including the Somerset Maugham Award. “Venomous Lumpsucker,” his fifth novel, is published in July in the U.K.
by Sceptre and in the U.S. by Soho Press.Thykier commented: “ ‘Venomous Lumpsucker’ is a hilarious and thrilling ride and the more the story unravels the stranger things become.
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