“Game of Thrones” actress Maisie Williams appears to be the frontrunner to star in “The Forest of Hands and Teeth,” a zombie-apocalypse drama based on Carrie Ryan’s best-selling novel.

Williams is in negotiations to play Mary, a teenage girl who lives “sometime in the future” when “most of the human race has been taken by a bloodthirsty virus that leaves them roaming the planet as cannibals,” according to Variety. To save the world, Mary will lead a small group of people out of her small village, the only world she’s ever known, through the titular woods.

First-time writer-director Kate Maberly will adapt, as well as produce. An actress-turned-filmmaker, Maberly is reportedly gaining buzz among studios for her short “Charlie’s Supersonic Glider.”

Here’s the book synopsis for “The Forest of Hands and Teeth”:

In Mary’s world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village; the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness. When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future — between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?

[via Variety]