A big screen adaptation of Patrick Ness’s popular dystopian YA trilogy Chaos Walking is in the works. The first installment of the bestselling fiction series, The Knife of Never Letting Go, was published in 2008. Doug Linman of the Bourne Identity franchise is in talks to direct the film.

Set in a world where living creatures can hear each others’ thoughts, the story centers on the only boy in a town full of men. A shocking discovery compels the boy to take his dog and flee the town. With the townspeople hot on their trail, they come across a silent, peculiar girl, and according to Variety, “They set off on a white-knuckle journey in which the boy must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is.”

This award-winning trilogy, which also features The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men, offers some interesting new twists on the much explored genre, but elements of the stories are reminiscent of classic dystopian tales like Logan’s Run and 1984.

This project has been in development for awhile. The latest draft of the script was written by Jamie Linden, best known for the 2006 sports drama, We are Marshall.

Linman is much in demand at the moment; and if he does sign on to direct the project, it will have to wait until he finishes his next movie, The Wall, an action film from Amazon starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The filmmaker’s other upcoming titles include Channing Tatum’s highly anticipated Gambit and Tom Cruise’s crime drama Mena.

Chaos Walking is expected to begin filming early next year.