And back to Ireland we go!
Deadline has the announcement:
Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne are set to co-star in Polly Steele’s upcoming drama Four Letters Of Love as the parents of fated lovers played by up-and-coming actors Fionn O’Shea and Ann Skelly.
The film is based on Niall Williams’s international bestselling novel, described as a lyrical and deeply romantic Irish story . . .
With funding from Northern Ireland Screen, the film will start shooting in February in Northern Ireland before moving to the Republic of Ireland . . .
O’Shea and Skelly play two youngsters who are meant to be together but may never connect, unless fate plays its part.
Brosnan is the young man’s father. He has quit his job, following divine instruction, to focus on painting, leaving his dependent wife and son to fend for themselves.
Byrne and Bonham Carter play the young woman’s parents. Byrne’s character is a poet and schoolmaster, while Bonham Carter is an intuitive mother, coping with the sudden paralysis of her son, the girl’s younger brother.
“I’m thrilled to be bringing this beautiful piece of work from writer Niall Williams and director Polly Steele to the screen. A seminal piece of Irish literature and I couldn’t be more pleased with the cast and creative team that have joined us on this journey,” said [producer Debbie] Gray.
Book Review
From The New York Times upon its first publication
November 9, 1997
Miracles Happen, by Katharine Weber
This first novel is rooted in Ireland’s language and landscape.
Love letters change lives, whether they are received, intercepted or lost. This truth lies at the heart of Niall Williams’s first novel, a delicate and graceful love story that is also an exaltation of love itself.
It is no surprise that Williams, the Dublin-born co-author (with his American wife, Christine Breen) of four charming memoirs of life in rural Ireland, should turn his hand to fiction. After all, these collaborations — particularly ”O Come Ye Back to Ireland” and ”The Luck of the Irish” — are filled with keenly observed characters and nicely told yarns. But although Williams and Breen’s stories about leaving New York’s fast lane for the bucolic joys and hardships of Kiltumper Cottage in County Clare are refreshingly free of condescension (unlike, say, Peter Mayle’s ”Year in Provence”), they are hardly literary masterpieces. So here’s the news from Ireland: Niall Williams has made a leap from the pleasant but ordinary language of these earlier books to a luminously written, magical work of fiction.
”Four Letters of Love” is an old-fashioned kind of novel — in the best, Jane Austen sense — in its tone and trajectory. But it is also very much a contemporary novel in its narrative organization, in which the complex weft of a first-person accounting of one life is woven through a warp of third-person chapters, still reflecting this same voice, that illuminate another character’s history. The four letters in the novel’s title are the letters of the word ”love” in both English and Latin; but they are also the life-changing love letters written over the years by various people in the story; and, finally, they are four particular love letters that are never received . . .
Contemporary Irish fiction is almost always about Irishness. Extraordinarily rooted in the Irish language and landscape, this novel is no exception, embracing both William Trevor’s dark Ireland and Maeve Binchy’s lighter one. Yet in its serious fancifulness, its feverish intensities, ”Four Letters of Love” also gives us Niall Williams’s own Ireland, a place devoted to the belief in miracles and the obsessive power of love.
Author Niall Williams on the web
His official website provides plenty of background information, a list of his publications, and more, so be sure to check it out!
Stay tuned for more about this intriguing new film! heart
This film sounds intriguing with all the various relationships. What a great cast !