WRITER Andrew O’Hagan has revealed his latest book is being adapted into “a large network show” for TV.
O’Hagan, whose award-winning novels include Our Fathers and Mayflies, published Caledonian Road earlier this year.
He said the “state-of-the-nation” book, which took him 10 years to research and write and has been described as “the story of one man’s epic fall from grace”, was being adapted by the people behind the Apple TV hit Slow Horses and HBO series Chernobyl.
The Glasgow-born author, 56, is set to be an executive producer and could also write “a few episodes”.
Speaking on BBC’s The Big Scottish Book Club, to be shown today, he said: “The people behind Slow Horses and also behind Chernobyl on HBO have come together to do Caledonian Road as a big returning series. It’s exciting.”
O’Hagan, who has previously been nominated for the Booker Prize, told how he spent a decade researching Caledonian Road, which has been described as “the story of one man’s epic fall from grace”.
He described the thrill of pulling together plots involving his many characters. But he said he had left some outcomes open in the novel, which could be explored in the TV adaptation.
He said: “There was a mad pinboard, bits of string and thread. I kept just adding to it. Other people who would come into my office would say ‘oh my god, what’s going on there’, but I knew exactly what was going on with the characters.
“There was almost a rhythm to the way the story over 700 pages was building and then suddenly you’re in that wonderful position which is creative heaven where you’re landing 25 planes simultaneously as their stories come in to land.
“I use that metaphor because it feels that dangerous while you’re doing it. Any of them could crash into the other or could fail to arrive.
“It’s just an amazing experience to have worked for ten years on a story with a cast of 59 characters and then see them all just come in, somehow descending to their end and you hope to do it with grace, that’s the great hope.”