A self-described “middle-aged bookish type,” Roberts knew the star’s name, but it took a Google search for her to realize the scale Styles would bring to the project.

Roberts chalks up the avalanche of attention for her book to one man: Harry Styles, who was cast to play policeman Tom Burgess, the titular character for whom unfulfilled Marion (a poised Emma Corrin) and besotted Patrick (the remarkable David Dawson) both ache. A reimagining of this endurance of love resulted in My Policeman, which follows a dashing closeted man of the force, his tolerant schoolteacher wife, and a slightly older museum curator who becomes his secret lover.Ĭharting a tug-of-war between wife and lover, My Policeman’s timeline ricochets between Marion’s 1999 contemplation of her unsatisfying marriage and Patrick’s clandestine 1957 diary entries of a surreptitious same-sex affair, stifled by the illicit nature of gay relations in ’50s Britain. “That idea took hold in me, I wanted to write about how you get to that point,” the author shares. Forster’s life-a distinguished gentleman, his love affair with a policeman, and the doting wife who cared for him until his last breath-that provided inspiration. The genesis of the novel can be traced to Roberts’s youth, specifically her obsession with James Ivory’s A Room with a View and its lush depictions of vacationing in Italy. Chronicling a trio of lovers, My Policeman is a reflection of insatiable desire and its repercussions. Following its initial 2012 United Kingdom release, the book has now been released in “15 or more translations has a whole new life that I never expected,” Roberts tells me, seated in front of an impressive wall-tall bookshelf in her Brighton home. It has taken nearly a decade and the announcement of a film adaptation starring one of today’s biggest pop stars for Bethan Roberts’s third novel, My Policeman, to be published in the United States.

My policeman hardcover