Anthony Minghella's romantic epics, The English Patient and Cold Mountain, are extraordinary stories told on a lavish scale. Both films were bestselling novels before they came to the big screen. But the Oscar-winning British director's next project, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, is to be taken from an unpublished book by a single mother living in London.
This time the novel Minghella has chosen to adapt is no passionate love story played out amid magnificent landscapes. Instead, it is a blackly comic tale about an accident-prone young boy who falls off a cliff and into the sea on his ninth birthday, but doesn't quite seem to die.
The story has echoes in the family history of the author, Liz Jensen, whose own grandmother died in mysterious circumstances - her body was discovered at the bottom of a cliff.
Much of Jensen's story is related by Louis Drax himself who, hours after the cliff-face accident, revives in a French hospital. The reader is never sure how he fell from the cliff nor quite how he was able to survive.
'When I started writing Louis, I wanted him to be almost demonic, and for there to be a grain of doubt over whether he might be exercising a kind of supernatural power,' said Jensen, who has yet to see the book in print. 'But he's not scary at all when you get to know him and realise what he's been through, he's just extremely disturbed.'
The novel opens with Louis's voice saying: 'I'm not most kids. I'm Louis Drax. Stuff happens to me that shouldn't happen, like going on a picnic where you drown.'
Jensen was initially convinced her macabre book was unfilmable, but an initial payment from the sale of the film rights has proved her wrong and transformed what she has described as her 'hand-to-mouth' life with her two sons. 'It is nice not to have that financial pressure any more,' she said.
'Anthony Minghella said that he wanted to direct it himself, and I could see him doing something extraordinary with it.'
Her publishers, Bloomsbury, are expecting the book to make Jensen a household name. Minghella's Mirage company, founded after the success of The English Patient, will be making the film with Miramax, the company behind Shakespeare in Love, Chicago and Gangs of New York. Minghella, who is now at work on the script, is planning to release the film next year.
Jensen told the publishing trade journal, the Bookseller, this weekend that memories of her family trauma inspired the novel. At the age of six she asked her mother why she had no grandmother. 'She jumped off a cliff,' was the blunt reply.
The thriller is Jensen's fifth book, the previous four, Egg Dancing, Ark Baby, The Paper Eater and War Crimes from Home, were all black comedies. 'This is my first grown-up book,' she says. 'But there is some humour in Louis, of a very dark kind.'
