Andrew Davies

The novel, written only months before Austen’s death, was never finished and consists of just eleven chapters.

The adaptation has been extended into an eight-part series starring Rose Williams (Curfew), Theo James (The Divergent series), Anne Reid (Last Tango in Halifax) and Kris Marshall (Death in Paradise).

Williams plays Charlotte Heywood, an impulsive and unconventional young woman who moves away from her rural hometown to the coastal resort of Sanditon, which is trying to reinvent itself as a fashionable retreat.

The six-part drama is the first screen adaptation of the novel and will be shot entirely on location in palaces, villages and streets in Northern India.

The story follows Lata, played by rising star Tanya Maniktala, a spirited university student, coming of age in North India in 1951.

At the same time the country is going through significant change, getting ready for its first democratic general election and adjusting to life as an independent nation.

"You have to remember what a partisan of the novel I am… and that it had long been one of my ambitions to have my novels defeat all attempts to put them on screen"

-Interview with Jonathan Franzen, New York Times, 26 June 2018

Sanditon, written just months before Austen’s death in 1817, tells the story of Charlotte Heywood, an impulsive and highly spirited young woman, and her spiky relationship with the wild and charming Sidney Parker.

After an accident sees the Heywood family transported from the rural hometown of Willingden to the up-and-coming seaside town of Sanditon, Charlotte is exposed to the intrigues of a town on the rise, and the people whose fortunes depend on its commercial success.