Man, it must feel good to be an author whose book is picked up for a movie deal before it's even published. It takes off all the pressure of the release, the reviews, how many copies you sell, because who cares! The movie will make money anyway! So today William Boyd must be a pretty happy man, as his novel Ordinary Thunderstorms has been picked up by BBC Films, three solid months before its September release.

The story is described by Variety as "a thriller set against the backdrop of a drug-testing conspiracy, which sees an ordinary man accused of a crime he didn't commit." Sounds pretty boilerplate, but also maybe something with potential to make an entertaining movie. David Thompson, the former head of BBC Films who picked up the book rights, told Variety "It's a hugely exciting proposition and very rare to come across a big London-set thriller that is both sophisticated and unpredictable in equal measure."