Peter Straughan, the screenwriter who adapted John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy into a successful movie, is to take on another melancholy tale of international intrigue: The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s bestselling and Pulitzer-winning novel.

Straughan won a Bafta in 2012 for his knotty yet elegant Tinker Tailor script, and was also nominated for an Oscar. His other adaptations include turning Toby Young’s showbiz journalism memoir How To Lose Friends and Alienate People into a Simon Pegg comedy, and Jon Ronson’s investigation The Men Who Stare at Goats into an unlikely George Clooney farce.

The Goldfinch seems well-suited to the screen, given its globetrotting action between New York, Amsterdam and Las Vegas, its blend of love story, terrorist acts and bone-crunching art crime, and its classic Tartt cast of beautiful introverts on the cusp of the monied classes. The rights to the book were bought by Warner Bros earlier this year, and they along with Brett Ratner’s production stable RatPac are getting the wheels in motion.

It’s now further along than any adaptation of The Secret History, Tartt’s equally successful first novel – the rights were bought by Warner Bros around its publication in 1992, with Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne tasked with adapting it. After producer Alan J Pakula died, it stalled, before being revived in 2002 with Gwyneth Paltrow set to co-produce. That version also failed to transpire, as did an attempted TV miniseries from Tartt’s university peer Bret Easton Ellis, working alongside Melissa Rosenberg, who adapted the Twilight novels for the screen.