Spinners — Anthony McCarten

A forthcoming feature film from the makers of Shakespeare in Love'A beautifully constructed comedy'Esquire, Books of the Year'Delia Chapman, a sixteen-year-old meat-packer sees a spaceman. Soon, news of the encounter has spread all over Opunake, arousing the secrets and desires of the inhabitants of this tiny, isolated, yet media-saturated, New Zealand town . . . Spinners combines the cultural savvy of an episode of The Simpsons with the formally meticulous confusion/resolution of a Shakespeare comedy'Times Literary Supplement'McCarten's dramatic gifts - with characterisation, plot, dialogue and humour - shine through this sparkling novel'Observer'An impressive novel full of alien abductions and small town neuroses . . . Weird, witty and wonderful'Mirror