Some clients you work with for a season. Some you grow alongside.
Marissa Stapley has been with us for years. Toronto author, former newspaper journalist, magazine editor, and creative writing teacher at the University of Toronto and Centennial College. Before all of that, briefly, a sports reporter, a bartender, a stable hand and a cemetery gardener. Which tells you something about where the material comes from.
This month one of her novels became a global number one.
The book
Lucky Armstrong is a con artist, raised in the life by her father John, running long games and moving on before anyone counts the money twice. Of her mother she knows almost nothing. A gold crucifix on a chain. A few grudging sentences.
Then a heist goes wrong. Her husband takes the score and vanishes. She is left holding a lottery ticket worth millions and no safe way on earth to cash it.
Lucky was published in 2021. That December it became the first Canadian title ever chosen for Reese’s Book Club. It went on to become a New York Times bestseller, published around the world. Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine optioned it almost immediately.
The adaptation
Lucky arrived on Apple TV on 15 July 2026. Seven episodes. The first two together, the rest weekly through to 19 August.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays Lucky and executive produces, her first television series since The Queen’s Gambit. Timothy Olyphant is her father. Annette Bening is Priscilla, the mob leader whose son Lucky married. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is the FBI agent closing in. Drew Starkey, Clifton Collins Jr., William Fichtner and Mo McRae round out the cast. Jonathan Tropper created and wrote the series, co-showrunning with Cassie Pappas.
The reception
Number one on Apple TV in the United States within two days of release. Number one in Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the UK and more besides. Still there a week later, with four episodes yet to air.
Critics came along too. Around 78 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes at time of writing, with the notices consistently singling out Taylor-Joy and Bening. NPR called it aggressively entertaining. The Daily Beast called it a 2026 standout.
Stapley herself has been generous about the changes the adaptation makes, arguing that a series has no obligation to be faithful to the book it came from. A rare and confident position for a novelist to take. Watching the show, it is easy to see why she took it.
Our part in it
We built the site and the brand that lives on it, and we have looked after both ever since. Events, launches, tour dates, new titles. The ongoing, unglamorous work of keeping an author’s home online current while she gets on with writing.
For the campaign around the series we worked alongside WildBound on the marketing materials, making sure everything held together across the book, the show, and everything pointing at both.
Working with authors is its own discipline. The site is not a shopfront. It is where a reader lands after they finish the last page and want to know who did that to them. It has to hold up under a sudden, enormous spike of exactly that kind of attention.
This month it did.
Read it, then watch it
Lucky is available wherever books are sold. The series is streaming on Apple TV, with new episodes weekly until 19 August.
Congratulations, Marissa. Thoroughly earned.
Visit marissastapley.com
