Can a saccharine romance novel save Harry and Meghan’s tarnished brand?

A tale of two star-crossed lovers who hit it off in their thirties. A mother tragically killed in a car crash. The burden of having to live up to parental expectation and take on the family business. These are not – spoiler alert – themes from Harry and Meghan’s recent tell-all Netflix documentary, but plot points from Meet Me at the Lake, the saccharine romance novel that the Sussexes recently opted to adapt for the screen, as part of their production deal with the streamer.

The rumoured $3m deal is the latest big entertainment industry play for the couple, who could do with another hit. Harry’s autobiography Spare broke UK first-day sales records when it was released back in January, but aside from that, the aspiring multimedia moguls have floundered. Plans for their first animated series, Pearl, which would have told the story of a young girl travelling through history to meet inspirational women, were scrapped last year. The biggest blow has been the end of their rumoured $20m podcast deal with Spotify; the partnership resulted in just one show, Archetypes, Meghan’s girl boss-inflected exploration of female stereotypes.

The decision to split with the audio company was mutual, but the fact that one of Spotify’s top executives, Bill Simmons, later publicly branded the Sussexes as “grifters” had to hurt. “They know all eyes will be on what they do [next],” says celebrity manager and PR expert Mayah Riaz – and crucially, after sharing a lifetime’s worth of Windsor goss in both Spare and their docu-series, the pair need “a way to show the public that they can do projects which are not about [the royals] and still get accolades”.

The second novel from former Refinery29 Canada journalist Carley Fortune, Meet Me at the Lake was flying high in the book charts even before brand Sussex gave it their seal of approval. There are shades of Taylor Jenkins Reid and weepy BookTok favourite Colleen Hoover in Fortune’s earnest, emotion-laden prose. When it was released in May this year, it debuted at number one on the New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback trade fiction; over on TikTok, you’ll see the painterly pink sunset cover art overlaid with breathless captions excitedly branding it: “THE summer book”. Confirming the news to The Independent earlier this week, Fortune said she was “thrilled” to be working with Netflix and Archewell, the Sussexes’ production company. “I can’t imagine a more perfect partnership,” she added.

So why have Meghan and Harry fallen so hard for the book? We don’t know a huge amount about their personal literary preferences; in her former incarnation as a lifestyle blogger, Meghan would share the odd book recommendation on her website The Tig, but tended to stick to motivational reads, self-help guides and spiritual tomes rather than fiction. Harry, meanwhile, shared some lukewarm praise for John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in his autobiography. “It was brief,” he wrote. “Of Mice and Men: one hundred and fifty little pages of nothing.”

Whatever the couple’s reading tastes, though, they were probably able to spot the potential for streaming gold in Fortune’s story, an appealingly straightforward romance that already has all the easily digestible plot contours of a 90-minute Netflix original movie. As the novel opens, we’re introduced to Fern Brookbanks, whose surname is just a mere typo away from that of Harry’s cousin-in-law (Jack Brooksbank, former brand ambassador for George Clooney’s tequila side hustle Casamigos, married Princess Eugenie a few months after H and M tied the knot in 2018).

32-year-old Fern is the manager of “a trio of indie coffee shops in Toronto’s west end called Filtr”. In some parallel universe (the multiverse of Markle?) you can certainly imagine Meghan dropping into one of those branches to pick up a latte en route to a Suits shoot; the duchess, you might not remember, was also an early investor in Clevr, an ethical latte powder brand with a similarly cavalier attitude to the letter “e”. Our heroine, we learn, has spent most of her adult life trying to put distance between herself and the Dirty Dancing-style lakeside resort that her family have owned for decades in Muskoka, Ontario; her childhood best friend still jokingly refers to her as “Baby”, much to her annoyance.

When her mother is killed in a car accident, Fern must return to her hometown to deal with the ailing Brookbanks business, putting her dream of opening her own coffee shop on hold (when she describes what this fantasy caffeine spot would look like, she imagines a cosy cafe with a stack of recipe books in the corner – including The Violet Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak, the woman behind Harry and Meg’s wedding cake). Then, in an awkward stroke of timing, who should turn up at the hotel’s front desk but a handsome figure from her past named Will? He is, we soon learn, the man who she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about for the best part of a decade, whose eyes are the colour of “a glass of Coke held up to the light”.

Back when they were both idealistic students, the pair met in Toronto and immediately hit it off, embarking on one of those intense, day-long pseudo-dates that only seem to happen in romantic comedies; it’s easy to imagine their adventure unspooling on screen in montage. They made plans to meet one year on at Fern’s family resort, but Will stands her up. Nine years on from this formative ghosting incident, is Will worthy of a second chance?

The story unfolds in two parallel timelines, one past, one present; in the former, Will emerges as a bit of a manic pixie dream boy, an aspiring artist who wears a T-shirt with the word “sketchy” written across it, carries a notebook around containing drafts for his own cartoon strip and addresses Fern Brookbanks by her full name, in the teasing way that non-threatening romantic heroes so often do. In the present, though, he’s all smart suits and corporate job, having sacrificed those artistic ambitions due to some hinted-at trauma that re-emerges every now and again in his “blank stare”.

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You might already have an inkling of how things will turn out for this almost-couple – but that doesn’t mean it won’t make a hit film (there’s probably not quite enough narrative heft to power a mini-series, if anyone at Archewell Productions is reading this). In romantic movies, predictability is a virtue. We watch them because they’re reassuring and come to them with assumptions about the shape that they will take.

In recent years, Netflix has developed a form for turning stories just like these into cosy, vaguely interchangeable streaming winners, from the likes of The Kissing Booth to the endless churn of festive love stories that arrive on the platform every November. Harry’s party prince days may be well and truly over, but a decent adaptation of Fortune’s book could be the stuff that hangover viewing sessions are made of – enjoyably emotional, might make you cry, probably involves a soggy reconciliation in the rain, a la The Notebook. Indeed, with its picture-perfect location and second-chance romance storyline, there’s something quite Nicholas Sparks-y about Meet Me at the Lake.

As for those much-vaunted real-life parallels? The car crash that kills Fern’s mother, with its tragic echoes of Princess Diana, has already been pinpointed as a particularly resonant plot detail, but the way Fortune’s book tackles familial duty will probably give the Sussexes more to work with. The resort, Fern says, “is its own tiny empire”, and her mother always expected that she would happily inherit the throne; in its closed-off community, her wild teenage antics were the stuff of gossip, and she fears she’s still considered a “screw-up” by the locals. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Harry nodding vigorously when Fern declares: “I didn’t want her life. I wanted a life of my own.” Can’t you hear it in an earnest voiceover already?

Another weighty subplot grapples with how parenthood can change a person, dealing with postnatal mental health problems; in the novel’s afterword, Fortune talks about her experiences of postpartum OCD, “a serious but treatable anxiety disorder with symptoms so horrifying, few of us are comfortable talking about it”. Her candour may well have struck a chord with the Sussexes, who have both been commendably open about their own mental health struggles. Their forays into documentary projects dealing with the subject, like the well-intentioned but oddly weightless Apple TV+ series The Me You Can’t See, have had mixed results so far – perhaps drama will be a better platform for them to explore these ideas.

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Sussex naysayers have already begun to question why a bestselling writer would give their screen rights to relatively inexperienced producers Harry and Meghan. But they’re wilfully underestimating the couple’s brand power: a romance movie with even the vaguest echoes of their story is certain to draw in viewers, even if they’re just watching out of vaguely hostile curiosity.

There’s likely to be “another huge boost” for book sales when the adaptation debuts, Riaz suggests; “celebrity endorsements and adaptations can often generate significant publicity and interest in a work”, notes Mark Gottlieb, vice president and literary agent at the New York-based agency Trident Media Group. When Fortune releases her third novel, too, the hype will have that extra Sussex-adjacent frisson. Plus, H&M are still attracting impressive talent to Archewell’s production arm: they recently hired Tracy Ryerson, who has previously worked at Peaky Blinders producer Caryn Mandaback Productions, as head of scripted content.

With screenwriters and actors currently on strike, the entertainment industry is in flux right now, meaning any potential adaptation of Meet Me at the Lake is a few years away. That leaves plenty of time for us to start dream-casting. Timothée Chalamet as young Will? I’m calling it now.