BBC Studios Fiction has optioned Sarah Waters’s 2014 novel THE PAYING GUESTS, marking the last work in her novels to date to be adapted for screen. With every other Waters novel already brought to film or television, this adaptation completes the set.

The story follows Frances Wray and her mother, living in a once‑respectable Camberwell villa in 1922, a London still unsettled by the aftermath of war. With their household diminished and finances strained, they are forced to take in lodgers: Lilian and Leonard Barber, a young couple of the ‘clerk class’ whose arrival shakes up the routines of the house in unexpected ways. As passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far, and how devastatingly, the disturbances will reach…

Kayleigh Llewellyn, screenwriter of the BBC series The Dream Lands, is attached to adapt the novel into a new series. Further details are yet to be announced.