M. Night Shyamalan wrote a novel with Nicholas Sparks
Out October 7, 'Remain' is a "supernatural thriller love story" that will be adapted into a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor.
Fresh off the success of last summer’s Trap, M. Night Shyamalan has co-written a novel with Nicholas Sparks, Remain, which Random House will publish on October 7, 2025 — the same day Thomas Pynchon’s new novel comes out.
Remain is a “supernatural thriller love story” about a New York architect who falls in love with a woman (who has a secret) while designing a house in Cape Cod. Shyamalan’s film adaptation of the novel (which doesn’t have a release date yet) will reportedly star Jake Gyllenhaal as the architect and Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton, Fair Play) as the woman, who may or may not run a bed-and-breakfast (the publicity description is vague):
When New York architect Tate Donovan arrives in Cape Cod to design his best friend’s summer home, he is hoping to make a fresh start. Recently discharged from an upscale psychiatric facility where he was treated for acute depression, he is still wrestling with the pain of losing his beloved sister. Sylvia’s deathbed revelation—that she can see spirits who are still tethered to the living world, a gift that runs in their family—sits uneasily with Tate, who struggles to believe in more than what reason can explain. But when he takes up residence at a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Wren who will challenge every assumption he has about his logical and controlled world.
Tate and Wren find themselves forging an immediate connection, one that neither has ever experienced before. But Tate gradually discovers that below the surface of Wren’s idyllic small-town life, hatred, jealousy, and greed are festering, threatening their fragile relationship just as it begins to blossom. Tate realizes that in order to free Wren from an increasingly desperate fate, he will need to unearth the truth about her past before time runs out . . . a quest that will make him doubt whether we can ever believe the stories we tell about ourselves, and the laws that govern our existence. Love—while transformative—can sometimes be frightening.
A story about the power of transcendent emotion, Remain asks us all: Can love set us free not only from our greatest sorrows, but even from the boundaries of life and death?
This is not the first time Shyamalan has written a book. In 2006, Little, Brown published his Lady in the Water: A Bedtime Story, illustrated by Crash McCreery, and in 2018, Simon & Schuster pubbed his “five keys to transforming America’s underperforming schools,” I Got Schooled.
I’m a little surprised Remain is set in Cape Cod, given Shyamalan’s tendency to film and set his movies in Philadelphia, and Sparks’s affinity for the North Carolina coast. But maybe there’s a plot reason that ties into the history of Massachusetts —Shyamalan’s done ghosts, superheroes, aliens, water nymphs, and serial killers, but he hasn’t told a story about witches.
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