Where the Crawdads Sing is the type of literary phenomenon that you surely know of even if you never read it yourself: Maybe you saw a copy of Delia Owens' novel in a friend or loved one's home, maybe you overheard it being recommended in a bookshop, maybe you saw its title on any of the 150 weeks its spent on The New York Times best seller list. Now, it is one of the most anticipated movies of the summer.

Like the novel, the movie unfolds over two intertwining timelines, telling the story of The Marsh Girl, the nickname foisted upon Catherine "Kya" Clarke due to her growing up on the North Carolina marshes alone after she was abandoned by her family. As an adult, Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a pariah in the nearby town of Barkley Cove and finds herself accused of murdering local golden boy Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson).

Where the Crawdads Sing is directed by Olivia Newman from a screenplay by Lucy Alibar and features an original track, "Carolina," by Taylor Swift, which can be heard in the trailer below. ("I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story," Swift wrote on Instagram.)

Sony Pictures also released a short vignette featuring Reese Witherspoon, who selected the novel for her Hello Sunshine Book Club back in 2018 and produced the movie through her Hello Sunshine productions.

"I loved the book Where the Crawdads Sing and wanted to turn it into a movie," Witherspoon says. "It's a thriller [and] it kept me guessing till the very, very end."

Where the Crawdads Sing will open in movie theaters on July 15.

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