Thunderbird Entertainment has optioned the rights to Cherie Dimaline’s dystopian novel The Marrow Thieves.

The Vancouver-based prodco plans to adapt the novel into a limited series for TV.

The Marrow Thieves follows a 16-year-old boy and his companions as they try to survive in a dystopian world where Indigenous people are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow.

Dimaline is a writer/editor from Ontario’s Georgian Bay Metis Community. She was previously named as the Emerging Artist of the Year at the eighth annual Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. The writer was also named the Toronto Public Library’s first Aboriginal Writer in Residence in 2015.

In addition to being a CBC Canada Reads selection, Dimaline’s novel previously won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Young People’s Literature and the Kirkus Prize for young readers literature in 2017.

The deal was negotiated by Linda Saint of Toronto’s The Saint Agency and Thunderbird’s Alex Raffé, senior VP scripted production.

On the book-optioning front, Thunderbird most recently picked up the rights to Max Brallier’s book series The Last Kids on Earth. Developed through Thunderbird’s animation arm Atomic Cartoons, the series was greenlit by Netflix in March.