Books to Film

2023 came to a close with an impressive range of Book to Film adaptations, serving as a reminder that many of the best movies ever made were based on books. We’ve compiled ten of the most popular adaptations that are well worth a read before you see them on your screens!

All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr

One of the most acclaimed and bestselling books of 2014. An epic novel set during WW2, from the prize winner Anthony Doerr.

Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorise it by touch and navigate her way home. But when the Nazis invade, father and daughter flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father’s life, until he discovers a knock for engineering. His talent sins him a place at a brutal military academy, but his way out of obscurity is built on suffering. At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Suzanne Collins

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes revisits the world of Panem sixty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games.

It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as the mentor in the Game. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to out charm, outwit, and out manoeuvre his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He’s been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined – every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favour or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute…and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.

Leave the World Behind – Rumaan Alam

Now on Netflix, starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke.

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter. But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another? This is a novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.

Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with – of all things – her mind. True chemistry results. Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (‘combine one tablespoons acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride’ proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women how to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.

A Man Called Ove – Fredrik Backman

A Man Called Otto, staring Tom Hanks, began it’s life as A Man Called Ove, a Swedish Novel by Fredrik Backman.

There is something about Ove. At first sight, he is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots – neighbours who can’t reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d’etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents’ Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets. But isn’t it rare, these days, to find such an old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such an unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just do? In the end, you will se, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible…

The Cabin at the End of the World – Paul Tremblay

The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay. 

Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbours are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road. One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologises and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidenifitable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.’ Thus begins an unbearable tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion. One in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined.

Daisy Jones and the Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid

Everybody knows Daisy Jones and the Six. From the moment Daisy walked barefoot on to the stage at the Whisky, she and the band were a sensation. Their sound defined an era. Their albums were on every turntable. They played sold-out arenas from coast to coast. Then, on 12 July 1979, it all came crashing down. They were lovers, friends, brothers. But they were also rivals. This is the story of their legendary rise and irrevocable fall. A story of ambition, desire, heartbreak and music.

Dungeons and Dragons

A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people.

The Last Thing He Told Me – Laura Dave

Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his new wife, Hannah. Protect her. Hannah knows exactly who Owen needs her to protect – his sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. And who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother. As her increasingly desperate calls to Owen do unanswered, his boss is arrested for fraud and the police start questioning her, Hannah realises that her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey might hold the key to discovering Owen’s true identity, and why he disappeared. Together they set out to discover the truth. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realise that their lives will never be the same again.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart – Holly Ringland

Alice Hart lives in isolation by the sea, where her mother’s enchanting flowers and their hidden messages shelter her from the dark moods of her father. When tragedy changes her life irrevocably, 9-year-old Alice goes to live with the grandmother she never knew existed, on a native flower farm that give refuge to women who, like Alice, are lost or broken. In the Victorian tradition, every flower has a meaning. As she settles into her new life, Alice uses this language of flowers to say the things that are too hard to speak. As she grows older, though, family secrecy, a devastating betrayal and a man who’s not all he seems, combine to make Alice realise there are some stories that flowers alone cannot tell. If she is to have the freedom she craves, she must find the courage to possess the most powerful story she knows: her own.

What’s coming up in 2024?

Boy Swallows Universe – Trent Dalton

Now a major Netflix series, starring Travis Fimmel, Simon Baker, Phoebe Tonkin, Byran Brown and Anthony La Paglia. 

Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It’s not as if Eli’s life isn’t complicated enough already. He’s just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way – not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer. But Eli’s life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He’s about to fall in love. And, oh yeah, he has to break into Boggo Road Gaol on Christmas Day, to save his mum.

Fool Me Once – Harlan Coben

The master of the double twist – The Times

Former special ops pilot Maya, home from the war, sees an unthinkable image captured by her nanny cam while she is at work: her two-year-old daughter playing with Maya’s husband, Joe – who had been brutally murdered two weeks earlier. The provocative question at the heart of the mystery: Can you believe everything you see with your own eyes, even when you desperately want to? To find the answer, Maya must finally come to terms with deep secrets and deceit in her own past before she can face the unbelievable truth about her husband – and herself.

It Ends With Us – Colleen Hoover

Lily hasn’t always had it easy. But that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up. She graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon names Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems too good to be true…But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his ‘no dating’ rule, she can’t help but wonder what make him that way in the first place

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