Guy Pearce always seems to succeed when coming home to Australia — the place where he launched his career — and after roles in The Proposition and Animal Kingdom, he’s set to return to The Outback for a new drama, according to Deadline.

The actor is set to lead a new film form Mark Joffe titled Violet Town, which is based on the Steven Carroll novel The Art Of The Engine Driver. The project, which is set in 1957, also has Rosamund Pike on board and follows the duo as a couple who unearths secrets at a New Year’s Eve party.

Scripted by Matt Cameron, Bryan Brown (Cocktail, Australia) also stars, presumably as another guest at the party. For those waiting for another Pearce film, one can see him in next summer’s Iron Man 3 and in the meantime, check out an extended synopsis of the novel for Engine Driver below via Amazon.

There they are, still as a photograph, listening for the distant thud of the sun as it prepares to drop from the sky …On a hot summer’s night, a family of three are off to a party in their bristling suburbia. But nothing is as it seems and soon we are walking with them through the past lives of a bully, a drunk and a disaffected youth. As the story of the neighbourhood unfolds the old and the new, diesel and steam, town and country all collide – and nobody will be left unaffected. “The Art of the Engine Driver” is a luminous and evocative take on ordinary suburban lives told with an extraordinary power and depth.

Production kicks off later next year for a likely 2014 release.

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