Firebrand picks Alpine thriller Shiver

UK indie prodco Firebird Pictures has bought the TV rights to Shiver, a thriller novel by former snowboarder Allie Reynolds.

Elizabeth Kilgarriff at Content London 2018

Earlier this year publisher Headline acquired the rights to the book for a six-figure sum after beating nine other publishers. It will be released in January 2021.

Firebird will turn the high-concept thriller into a TV series which co-founder Elizabeth Kilgarriff described as “television gold dust.”

Shiver is set in the French Alps and tells the story of five friends reuniting years after a snowboarding competition they all competed in and where their sixth friend went missing. The five are trapped in a deserted hotel at the top of a mountain and the secrets of their past are about to come to light with increasingly dangerous consequences.

Former BBC execs Kilgarriff and Craig Holleworth founded Firebird Pictures, with backing from BBC Studios, earlier this year.

“To find a story that combines the high-stakes, dangerous world of competitive snowboarding with a locked-room mystery set in a spooky hotel is television gold dust,” Kilgarriff said.

“Tightly plotted and with an engaging cast of young characters, Allie’s story mixes genre in a way that feels incredibly fresh and promises huge visual and emotional scale.”

British-born Reynolds is a former snowboarder who moved to Australia in 2003 and taught English as a foreign language for 15 years. In 2018, she became a full-time writer, with Shiver her debut novel.