Harriet Alida Lye did an interview with the
Chicago Review of Books for its monthly 'cli-fi' trends column. She tweeted: "This interview was an aspect that hasn’t been discussed much yet in reference to 'The Honey Farm'/ so I was thrilled to get the opportunity to talk about it,'' https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/07/24/the-honey-farm-harriet-alida-lye-interview/
#CliFi
Chicago Review of Books for its monthly 'cli-fi' trends column. She tweeted: "This interview was an aspect that hasn’t been discussed much yet in reference to 'The Honey Farm'/ so I was thrilled to get the opportunity to talk about it,'' https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/07/24/the-honey-farm-harriet-alida-lye-interview/
#CliFi
'The Honey Farm' Movie in the Works with Hawkeye Pictures – Variety
https://variety.com/2018/film/.../the-honey-farm-movie-hawkeye-pictures-120274449...
Apr 5, 2018 - Hawkeye Pictures has acquired the film and television rights to Harriet Alida Lye's debut novel, "The Honey Farm." ... Print · Pin It · Tumblr. The Honey Farm. CREDIT: Courtesy of Liveright. Toronto-based production company ...DEAL NEWS: Film/TV rights to Harriet Alida Lye's THE HONEY FARM ...
transatlanticagency.com/.../deal-news-film-tv-rights-to-harriet-alida-lyes-the-honey-fa...
Apr 5, 2018 - DEAL NEWS: Film/TV rights to Harriet Alida Lye's THE HONEY FARM ... Lye's THEHONEY FARM (World Rights Available Ex: U.S., Liveright; ...DEAL NEWS: FILM/TV RIGHTS TO HARRIET ALIDA LYE’S THE HONEY FARM
Film/TV rights to Harriet Alida Lye‘s thrilling debut novel, THE HONEY FARM, have sold to Sonya Di Rienzo and Aeschylus Poulos of Hawkeye Pictures. The deal was arranged by Kim Yau of Paradigm on behalf of Stephanie Sinclair.
The novel tells the story of two budding artists who move to a remote farm and begin a romance, as creepy, inexplicable events, possibly orchestrated by the enigmatic woman in charge, start to unfold around them. In the hands of brilliant newcomer Harriet Alida Lye, the natural world is both lovely andmenacing, as lushly depicted as the interior lives of her characters. Building to a shocking conclusion, THE HONEY FARM announces the arrival of a bold new voice and offers a thrilling portrait of creation and possession in the natural world.
Hawkeye Pictures is a producer of feature films, tv series, documentaries and digital content. Recent film credits include Sleeping Giant (Cannes Film Festival, Semaine de la Critique); Mary Goes Round (Toronto International Film Festival 2017); and 22 Chaser (2018). The latest project, Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies, is currently in production.
Selected Prepublication praise for Harriet Alida Lye’s THE HONEY FARM (World Rights Available Ex: U.S., Liveright; Canada, Vagrant Press; Australia, Penguin Random House):
Harriet Alida Lye is a writer from Richmond Hill, Ontario. She studied Philosophy and English at the University of King’s College. Her debut novel, The Honey Farm, was released in 2018 AND IT WAS RELEASED IN THREE NATIONS AT ONCE: Canada, USA and Australia AND a Hollywood producer has already snapped up film rights to the novel, if it ever gets the greenlight to become a motion picture, ten years from now. These things take time. Development hell.
Fiction
'The Honey Farm' Movie in the Works MAYBE PERHAPS COULD BE with Hawkeye Pictures – Variety
https://variety.com/2018/film/.../the-honey-farm-movie-hawkeye-pictures-120274449...
Apr 5, 2018 - Hawkeye Pictures has acquired the film and television rights to Harriet Alida Lye's debut novel, "The Honey Farm." ... Print · Pin It · Tumblr. The Honey Farm. CREDIT: Courtesy of Liveright. Toronto-based production company ...
https://variety.com/2018/film/.../the-honey-farm-movie-hawkeye-pictures-120274449...
Apr 5, 2018 - Hawkeye Pictures has acquired the film and television rights to Harriet Alida Lye's debut novel, "The Honey Farm." ... Print · Pin It · Tumblr. The Honey Farm. CREDIT: Courtesy of Liveright. Toronto-based production company ...MAYBE PERHAPS COULD BE MOVIE DEAL NEWS: Film/TV rights SOLD to Harriet Alida Lye's THE HONEY FARM ...
transatlanticagency.com/.../deal-news-film-tv-rights-to-harriet-alida-lyes-the-honey-fa...
Apr 5, 2018 - DEAL NEWS: Film/TV rights to Harriet Alida Lye's THE HONEY FARM ... Lye's THEHONEY FARM (World Rights Available Ex: U.S., Liveright; ...
The Honey FarmNimbus Canada, April 2018; Liveright U.S.A, May 2018; Penguin Random House Australia, 2018
transatlanticagency.com/.../deal-news-film-tv-rights-to-harriet-alida-lyes-the-honey-fa...
Apr 5, 2018 - DEAL NEWS: Film/TV rights to Harriet Alida Lye's THE HONEY FARM ... Lye's THEHONEY FARM (World Rights Available Ex: U.S., Liveright; ...A Buzzworthy Debut About a Mysterious and Secluded Artists’ Retreat
NYTIMES BOOK REVIEW, June 2018
NYT book review in June 2018
THE HONEY FARM
By Harriet Alida Lye
328 pp. Liveright Publishing. $25.95.
By Harriet Alida Lye
328 pp. Liveright Publishing. $25.95.
Bees are weird. The peculiar mating rituals, the doomed drones who wait all their lives for a single sexual encounter with an omnipotent queen, leading to immediate death. As humans, we find them fascinating: perhaps the only species whose gender politics are more screwed up than our own.
In “The Honey Farm,” the debut novel by the Canadian writer Harriet Alida Lye, the inner workings of a bee colony become an eerie metaphor for communal living gone awry. At the center of the novel is Silvia, a recent university graduate who replies to an exuberant online ad for “THE HONEY FARM. Free retreat for artists, writers, thinkers!” It’s unclear which category Silvia belongs to, but she is nonetheless offered room and board in exchange for work on the farm.
It seems, at first, an idyllic setting: Think Yaddo with bees. Running the show is the mysterious Cynthia, the farm’s proprietor and queen bee, who supervises the chores that occupy most of the day. The residents — two brothers who make documentary films, a French Canadian artist couple and Ibrahim, a driven young painter from Toronto, among others — are shocked to find that the farm has no internet access, no cellphone signal. Its only link to the outside world is a phone booth at the end of the lane.
'Raised in a conservative Christian home, Silvia seems younger than her years. Her innocence is believable, but her passivity is narratively problematic. She is a character to whom life simply happens. She drifts into a love affair with Ibrahim and feels guilty about not telling her parents. She sleeps a great deal and has cryptic dreams. The story gathers momentum when, to her utter astonishment, she finds herself pregnant — a fact she discovers only when a clerk in a grocery store inexplicably hands her a pregnancy test she doesn’t ask or pay for. Ever obedient, Silvia finds a restroom and pees on the stick.
''The story takes a dark turn when Cynthia shows a disturbing interest in Silvia’s unborn baby, building to a climax that should be harrowing, but isn’t, since Silvia lacks the drive to save herself or even understand the nature of the danger she’s in.
''When it comes to creating suspense, “The Honey Farm” succeeds almost too well. The unexplained phenomena of early summer, so vividly rendered, in the end amount to nothing. The drought eases, the bloody water clears and the frogs are gone as quickly as they appeared. In the end, the novel doesn’t deliver on its sinister promise. “It starts with the bees,” the spooky prologue tells us, “and it’ll end this way too.” If only that were true.''
The writing is uneven, but Lye is at her best when describing the natural world. “By the end of June, the fuzzy-headed clover will have finished its season,” she writes. “The bees will have sucked the purple straws dry.” Her fascination with apian life and the little-known techniques of beekeeping give rise to the most memorable scenes in the novel, as when Silvia learns to harvest royal jelly from the hive.
It’s a satisfying setup, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie mystery, the entire cast of characters marooned together in an exotic locale. Strange events ensue. Silvia drinks from a garden hose and finds the water blood-colored. The group is afflicted with head lice. A swim in a murky pond disturbs an unimaginable number of frogs, which soon infiltrate the house. The incidents seem related to an unprecedented drought that’s making the bees anxious. Clearly, evil is afoot.
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