H. E. Bates Lydia". His most popular creation was the Larkin family in "The Darling Buds of May". Pop Larkin and his family were inspired by a colourful character seen in a local shop in Kent by Bates and his family when on holiday. The man (probably Wiltshire trader William Dell, also on holiday) turned up to the shop with a huge wad of rubber-banded bank notes and proceeded to spoil his trailer load of children with Easter eggs and ice creams. The television adaptation, produced after his death by his son Richard and based on these stories, was a tremendous success. It
The Darling (novel) or unwillingness to bring Hannah's African family to life" calling it a "major failure on Banks's part, in a book otherwise reverberating with ideas and startling prose." A film adaptation of The Darling starring Cate Blanchett and directed by Martin Scorsese was planned and later scrapped. In 2011 Jessica Chastain was rumoured to be attached to the role of Hannah with Denis Villeneuve directing. The Darling (novel) The Darling is a historical novel written by Russell Banks, and published on October 12, 2004 by HarperCollins. The novel is narrated by white American liberal Hannah Musgrave, a woman in her fifties