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Australian novelist Amy Taylor thought she’d carved out a brief intermission between two labours of love: the release of her second novel, Ruins, and the imminent arrival of her first child. Then came the email: someone wanted to turn her novel about a young couple at a crossroads and their ill-fated trip to Athens into a film. Turns out, a lot of someones did.
“It was the quiet before the storm of publication,” Taylor says. “Then it snowballed, and we ended up with nine meetings booked across different production companies, and the last one was three days before I gave birth.”
Taylor, who lives in Brunswick, in Melbourne’s inner north, found herself 39 weeks pregnant, juggling Zoom calls at all hours, watching her inbox ping with new pitches from different production companies. For Taylor, it offered comfort that her story, not yet on the shelves, was resonating with readers.
Novelist Amy Taylor has sold the screen rights to her novels The Ruins and Search History.Credit: Celeste Holm
“It was the best experience ever, especially in that period right before publication,” Taylor says. “I was in the stage where it’s just radio silence in a way. So to be able to go on these calls with production companies and just have them say lovely things to me was such a treat in that period.”
The meetings and emails resumed a few days after Teddy was born before the rights went to Oscar-nominees Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman; Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning) and Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice; A Different Man), who will produce and star as the lead couple – freshly unemployed Emma and academic Julian – in the Miramax adaptation.
“I was trying very hard to be cool for the first meeting. They introduced themselves and started talking, and I remember glancing at myself in the corner of the screen – my face was just like … And I thought I was being really cool,” Taylor laughs.
What convinced her ultimately wasn’t the wattage, but their love for the novel. “I was drawn to the genuine passion from everyone involved,” she says. “And I got to hear from Vanessa and Sebastian as well about their connections to the work, which was very generous of them and something I really appreciated.”
It’s not difficult to see what drew them in (think Netflix’s 2021 adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, starring Olivia Colman, for the screen aesthetic). Ruins is a page-turner, glistening with the sweat, sunshine and spanakopita of Greece. Emma and Julian arrive in Athens to house-sit for a friend – and to recalibrate and reconnect – but tensions simmer, particularly over whether they want to try for a child. Meeting Lena, a charismatic local, tips the trip into disarray. The story resists postcard Greece – whitewashed villages and endless blue seas – in favour of something claustrophobic, charged and intimate. Relationships teeter on a knife-edge, complicated by class, history, and desire.
Vanessa Kirby is slated to play Emma in the film adaptation of The Ruins.Credit: AP
“Athens has such a complex, turbulent history, and even in more recent times, with economic turbulence. It’s not an easy place to live, and it’s not an easy place to holiday even. I thought that atmosphere would make for a good setting for a novel where there was already an undertone of escalation of pressure,” Taylor says.
Taylor first visited Athens in 2019. While many visitors breeze past on their way to island getaways, she was drawn to the layers of history. She returned for research trips, notebook in hand, but wrote most of the novel from Melbourne, where she moved in 2020, after growing up in Perth.
“I was just absorbing as much as I could, as quickly as I could and walking around the streets so that when I came home, I could look at my Google Maps and recall where that was and what that looked like, so I could carry these characters through the city.”
Greek mythology subtly shapes the book’s architecture. Its three-act arc nods to classical drama: a chorus-like introduction, a rising complication, the “hand of God” – a plot device where an unsolvable problem resolves unexpectedly – and the ever-present shadow of Medea, whose mythological influence threads through the story.
‘I was trying very hard to be cool for the first meeting.’
The leap from Brunswick to Athens wasn’t without hesitation. Taylor’s first novel, Search History (2023), was rooted in a city she lived in every day. Moving to another language, another landscape, was daunting. Yet, the two novels share a thematic continuity: Search History explored a young woman’s increasingly pathological obsession with her boyfriend’s dead ex, and Ruins continues that fascination with tangled love triangles.
Amy Taylor’s second novel, Ruins, is set in Greece.
“I think it’s really hard to write a novel where it’s just two people breaking up. To me, that third element is what makes the conflict and tension and what makes a story out of it. I don’t even see that just in relationships. I feel like every novel I write will probably in some way have three people,” Taylor says.
When we speak, Teddy is six weeks old. Taylor admits sleep is scarce, but the baby has offered a kind of ballast.
“There are two different worlds I can escape into when I need a reset,” she says. “And having something as grounding as a newborn snaps you back to reality when the anxieties of publishing rise.”
The film deal has also given her something else invaluable: time. With both Ruins and Search History now optioned (Search History by Netflix earlier this year), Taylor, who formerly worked in marketing, says she has bought herself some breathing room to work on her third novel.
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“As I’m watching the clock tick, and I’m making this decision about whether it’s more important to me to get a job so that I can write my third book slower, or whether I want to try and delve into the third book faster and where Teddy factors in, I just kept saying to my partner, I need someone to just drop some money into my life. That’s what I need,” she says with a laugh.
The gods, fittingly, delivered. And while her next novel is simmering, all going well, Taylor may soon find herself back in Athens, this time as an executive producer on the adaptation. A fitting full circle: the ruins that once shaped her fiction could soon set the stage for her film.
Ruins is out now via Allen and Unwin.
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