The question dogging Emily in the book is “Who was my sister?” says Saint X showrunner Leila Gerstein. “Are the people on this island those people? Are the things out the van window poverty, or just people living their lives? She doesn’t know how she would even begin to know.” How Saint X ’s television adaptation departs from the book “In her Global Justice class, she learned that two billion people, more than a third of the humans on earth, live on less than two dollars a day,” the book reads.

The book version of the “$2 a day” scene finds Alison also peering out the window at the “scruffy dogs and houses with rebar sticking up out of the roofs.” (Though Schaitkin is listed as an executive producer, she wasn’t involved in the TV adaptation.)Īt 350 pages, the novel cracks open the inner workings of its characters and their thoughts-especially Alison’s-more than the show can. Within a month or so of Saint X selling to its publisher, there were already offers for a TV option. The push to get the story on screen began well before the book was published: the manuscript went out on submission to editors in June of 2018, and was simultaneously being sent to production studios. Saint X originated as a novel by Alexis Schaitkin, that was published in February 2020 to critical acclaim. What to know about the book that inspired Saint X Years later, an adult Claire (who now goes by her middle name, Emily, and is played by Alycia Debnam-Carey) has a chance encounter that reopens the trauma and sets her on an obsessive spiral toward the truth.

But the timeline doesn’t add up, the evidence is paltry, and Edwin and Clive are soon released, leaving Alison’s case unresolved. Alison is a golden girl-a beautiful, white Princeton freshman-and her murder immediately sets off a tabloid frenzy in the U.S.

The woman in white novel