Keira Knightley will star in and take a producer's role on the jazz-age period piece The Other Typist, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Based on Suzanne Rindell's 1920s-set debut novel, published in the UK this month, the film will centre on a lonely young typist living in a downtrodden police precinct on New York's Lower East Side who befriends an exotic, stylish new arrival at her workplace. Together, Rose and Odalie explore the Big Apple's seedy yet glorious underworld.

The Guardian's John O'Connell has compared Rindell's book with other famous examples of the "unreliable narrator", such as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley and Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal, both of which have been made into films. The novel has also drawn comparisons with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and – perhaps inevitably, given the high-profile debut of Baz Luhrmann's starry big-screen version – F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

The Hollywood Reporter does not make clear whether Knightley is to play the prudish Rose or the enigmatic and charismatic Odalie. The Other Typist has been picked up by 20th Century Fox offshoot Fox Searchlight, which produced another recent tale of two young women with diametrically opposed personalities, the Oscar-winning Black Swan. The new film does not yet have a director attached.