Prince Harry and Meghan Markle buy film rights to book echoing Princess Diana’s death

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have bought the rights to a book that echoes details from their own love story. Photo / Netflix

Prince Harry and Meghan have reportedly signed a multi-million-dollar deal for the rights to turn a best-selling book about a couple who find love in their 30s into a Netflix film.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to have bought the rights to the romance novel Meet Me At The Lake by Canadian journalist and author Carley Fortune.

The novel, which sold 37,000 copies in the first week after its publication in May, centres on a love story about a couple who meet in their 30s, one of whom lost a parent in a car crash and went on to struggle with alcohol and drug use.

Some reports have drawn similarities to the royal couple’s own romantic story.

Prince Harry was 32 years old in 2016 when he met his wife, who was then aged 35. They married in 2018, welcomed their first child, Prince Archie in 2019, and their second, Princess Lilibet in 2021.

Fortune’s novel also covers themes of mental health and post-natal depression and is set in Toronto, where the Duchess lived when the pair first started dating and when she was working as an actress filming the US TV series Suits.

“The themes of the book gripped the couple and it was chosen for their first adaptation with Netflix,” a source told The Sun on Sunday.

Adapting the novel for the screen would mark a change in direction for the couple and their future Hollywood career, taking them from documentaries into fiction production.

The source material for Harry and Meghan's rumoured new Netflix project bears similarities to Princess Diana's story. Photo / AP

It would be the first time that Archewell Productions, the couple’s company, has paid to turn a novel into a drama as part of their Netflix deal.

The announcement comes just weeks after their reported $20 million (NZ$32m) Spotify deal ended after airing only one series of Meghan’s Archetypes podcast. The podcast was released weekly and ran for 12 episodes, each focused on the different labels and stereotypes levelled against women.

Their Spotify deal followed a similarly lucrative deal with Netflix, rumoured to be worth more than £100 million (NZ$209m).

The new production of Meet Me At The Lake has reportedly stalled due to Hollywood screenwriters being on strike for more than three months. The Sun quoted a source as saying: “This is their biggest and most significant as producers.”

The couple's newest project contains very similar themes to their own love story. Photo / Netflix

Fortune’s novel is published by Penguin Random House, which also published Prince Harry’s explosive memoir, Spare.

Prince Harry has previously spoken about how psychedelic drugs were like “medicine” in dealing with his grief and trauma.

He said that his experience taking the plant-based psychedelic, ayahuasca, helped him cope with the death of his mother, Princess Diana, who died aged 36 in a car crash while being chased by paparazzi in Paris in 1997. Prince Harry was 12 years old when his mother passed and his brother, Prince William, was 14.

In an interview with The Telegraph in January, Prince Harry said that the drug helped him to come to terms with his mother’s death. He said: “After taking ayahuasca with the proper people,” he said, “I suddenly realised – wow! – it’s not about the crying. She [Diana] wants me to be happy. So this weight off my chest was not the need to cry, it was the acceptance and realisation that she has gone, but that she wants me to be happy and that she’s very much present in my life.”

Prince Harry is currently working on a Netflix series, Heart of Invictus, based around the Invictus Games, which is expected to be released later this year.

Archewell Productions and Penguin Random House were contacted for comment.

Netflix declined to comment.