Arlington native Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel “We Love You, Charlie Freeman’’ is on its way to the big screen. Sovereign Films, an independent production company based in London, recently acquired the rights with screenwriter Jonathan Feldman on board, Greenidge confirmed Wednesday via Twitter.

The book, published in March, takes place in the 1990s and traces the lives of the Freemans, an African-American family who recently moved from Dorchester to a predominantly white town in rural Massachusetts for the mother’s work. The group has taken on the task of teaching sign language to a chimpanzee named Charlie as part of a research experiment and are luxuriously housed on the grounds of the private Toneybee Institute. The coming-of-age story centers on Charlotte, the Freemans’s 14-year-old daughter, and explores themes of race, sexual identity, and familial relationships.

Greenidge, whose sister Kirsten’s Obie-winning play “Milk Like Sugar’’ was staged earlier this year at the Huntington, thanked Sovereign producers Donald Rosenfeld (“Howard’s End,’’ “The Remains of the Day’’) and Andreas Roald (“Effie Gray’’) for taking on the project in an interview with the British news website Britflicks.

Sonia Rao can be reached at sonia.rao@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @misssoniarao.