The author of "Gone, Baby, Gone" may have found his lead actor for the film adaption of "Live by Night."
According to the Huffington Post, Ben Affleck may go back to Dennis Lehane's books for "Live by Night." Affleck already directed Lehane's "Gone Baby Gone" film in 2007, and just finished "Argo," which he is getting rave reviews for.
"Should he direct, 'Live by Night' would return Affleck to the Boston streets of his pre-'Argo' efforts 'Gone Baby Gone' and 'The Town.' Unlike those contemporary films, however, Lehane's novel takes place in the 1920s," Huffington Post said.
Lehane is also best known for his film adaptions of "Mystic River," and most recent, "Shutter Island," which starred Leonardo Di Capri.
"Live by Night" recently landed on the New York Times Bestsellers List. It is the second novel in a series of book set around the Prohibition era and after. "The Given Day" was the first book.
The 416-page mobster story is described:
Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.
"Live by Night" was published on Oct. 2 by HarperCollins Publishers.
[READ EXCERPT HERE]
The crime novel has gotten rave reviews:
Live by Night is Crime Noir 101, as taught by the best of its current practitioners...sophisticated, literary and barbed...a sentence-by-sentence pleasure. You are in the hands of an expert. And you'll know it.
-Janet Maslin, New York Times
A richly-layered Dennis Lahane crime thriller.
-Barnes and Noble
"[Dennis Lehane] deserves to be included among the most interesting and accomplished American novelists of any genre or category."
-Washington Post Book World
Many readers gave the on GoodReads gave the novel four and five stars.
One review said, "This is a Right Now book. Meaning my wife read it and I had to read it right now so we could discuss it. Not tomorrow or when I was less busy but drop everything because it's so good that it needs to be shared like a movie."
Another said, "I was suitably impressed. Dennis is a great writer, and his marvelously detailed and nuanced story of the life of an gangster... oops, outlaw... during the Prohibition era (late 20s/early 30s) was absorbing and entertaining. I was worried that the over-the-top male energy of this type of book would put me off, but Dennis writes terrific women, and makes them central to the story. Add to that a fascinating and engaging main character in Joe Coughlin, and the well-researched historical detail, and you've got a real winner."
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