Books that have been adapted into movies
A Hallowe'en Party/A Haunting in Venice
by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie's books are constantly being turned into movies and TV series, and 2023 is no exception. British actor Kenneth Branagh is back as her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, for a third time. The movie is called A Haunting in Venice and the book it's based on A Hallowe'en Party, one of the later Christies, written when she was 78. It's set in the English countryside at a children's party, where apple bobbing goes horribly wrong. It features Ariadne Oliver, Poirot's scatty writer friend, as a main character. As you would expect from Christie, it has a clever plot. In bookstores, you may see a special edition of the book, with a foreword by screenwriter Michael Green, who admits to having committed his own crime while writing the screenplay for the film: "I confess I stole that sparkling ingenious premise — a murder at a Halloween Party — and killed the rest."
Maigret and the Dead Girl
by Georges Simenon
Now out in a movie with Gerard Depardieu as the French police inspector, Maigret and the Dead Girl is a good place to start with this classic European detective series by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989). Simenon wrote around 75 Maigret novels, so the quality tends to vary. These are realistic novels, in that they're not selling escapism and you do feel like you're in Paris in the 1950s, going around with Maigret as he deals with often sad lives and even sadder crimes.
“Oh my God, I love that book so much…It has many different characters telling the same story from different points of view, and you get to know the characters through how all of the other characters see them. It’s a perfect example of alignment in how the characters are portrayed and also the differences, by the way the emotional content comes through in the audiobook.” Read more...
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin
🏆 Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
American Prometheus is a bestseller (again) in the wake of Christopher Nolan's movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer. The movie is long, as is the book (700+ pages) but it is highly readable. The scariness of the weapon Oppenheimer ended up creating gives the book a built-in narrative momentum as you read about his German Jewish background, his schooling in New York and holidays in New Mexico, into the major events of his life.
The Bridgerton Box Set: Books 1–4
by Julia Quinn
The Bridgerton books, penned by Julia Quinn, immerse readers in a captivating Regency-era world filled with romance, wit, and intricate family dynamics. Sales of the book series saw a resurgence after its popular 2020 Netflix adaptation.
“This is one of the very few novels that I’ve read twice. My lasting memory of it, and I think why it plays such a special role for me, is that it’s such a poignant and touching and unflinching depiction of change, and of when people feel caught out by change, and how the old order feels about the introduction of new customs and new regimes. There’s this kind of wistful way in which the prince describes his own inability to move with the times. For anyone who’s interested in Europe, where we’ve just seen this ceaseless ebb and flow of the new replacing the old, I just don’t think you can find a better book to summarise the wisdom and the conservatism and nostalgia that any order that is having to make way for a new order feels.” Read more...
Nick Clegg on his Favourite Books
Nick Clegg, Politician
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful book, and it was also turned into an Oscar-winning film. Brokeback Mountain is important to me because it’s the first time I’ve heard ordinary people in the street comment on a story focused on homosexual love—without distinguishing between it and heterosexual love. The film helped bring gay sex into the mainstream. The way the sex is described is not feminine sex. Annie Proulx is excellent at not saying: ‘Well, it’s gay sex, but it’s acceptable because it’s gentle and sensitive and soft focus and pink.’ No. In the book there is blood. They hit each other. There is loving force and strong passion. She’s saying that passion can be aggressive and it can be very masculine.” Read more...
Susan Quilliam, Psychologist
“It’s evocative because it’s the First World War seen through German eyes…All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of a German private soldier on the front line and it’s a very moving account of the deprivation and the hardship he goes through, showing us that innocent people were thrown into uniform and told to serve whether they liked it or not.” Read more...
Jeffrey Archer, Novelist
Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Thief (book)
by Maurice Leblanc
Anyone watching the Netflix series Lupin, featuring French comedian Omar Sy as a charming criminal and master of disguise, will be wondering whether the book that his father gives him and that inspires him throughout, Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Thief by Maurice Leblanc, actually exists and, if so, whether it's worth reading. The answer is yes and yes. While the setting and characters in the Netflix series have little connection with the original book, which was published before World War I, the stories are a lot of fun, and short.
The first Arsène Lupin story, "The Arrest of Arsène Lupin" appeared in 1905 in a French magazine and was followed by countless others. One story has already featured on Five Books, in an interview on the best art crime books. The stories have a feel of Sherlock Holmes, though Arsène Lupin is a very affable character, unlike his British counterpart.
The books are out of copyright, so it's definitely worth reading them for free as ebooks. We've linked a version that is currently free, but if that doesn't work, you can also get them free via Project Gutenberg. The first book of eight stories includes "The Queen's Necklace", the story that the Netflix series opens with (loosely speaking).
One additional reason to possibly get the Arsène Lupin book: the French version (also available for free as an ebook) is not too difficult, and easy to read with the dictionary feature that Kindles have, if you don't recognise a word.
The Pale Blue Eye (book)
by Louis Bayard
The Pale Blue Eye (2003) by Louis Bayard is an excellent murder mystery, reminiscent of Wilkie Collins in its style. It's set at West Point Military Academy in upstate New York in the 19th century and features Edgar Allan Poe, author of what most experts agree is the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The Pale Blue Eye is set in the period before Poe became a writer of detective fiction and is not in any way based on a true story, though Poe did attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. After a stint in the army, Poe joined West Point in March 1830, was good at the classes (especially French), but hated the discipline, stopped attending classes and was court-martialled and officially dismissed a year later.
The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
by Che Guevara
Che Guevara is such an icon that it's interesting reading him in the first person, describing his road trip across Latin America with a friend as a student in the early 1950s. He's quite funny. He wrote quite a few other, more serious books—about the Cuban Revolution and also fighting in Bolivia, where he was caught and executed. They're all written in note form, so quite readable although a bit of extra reading may be needed for context.
A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1)
by George R R Martin
A Game of Thrones is the first book in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, first published in 1996. The book achieved cult status, though Martin did not start hitting the bestseller lists until later in the series (In fact, Martin joked in an interview that at one book signing for A Game of Thrones, rather than attracting a crowd, he actually drove four customers out of the bookstore). The book is nearly 800 pages long and creates a world that is essentially medieval. Different families vie for power—the 'game of thrones'—in a world of horses and knights, jousting tournaments, castles for the aristocracy and huts for the masses. Across the sea, there is also a Mongol-style empire with horsemen living out on the grasslands. The story is told through multiple perspectives, mostly though not exclusively members of one artistocractic family, the Starks. It's a brutal world, where no one can trust anyone.
Heartstopper
by Alice Oseman
Alice Oseman's heartwarming YA webcomic has taken the world by storm. The love story between rugby boy Nick Nelson and the charmingly nerdy Charlie Spring has captivated readers since the YA novelist Alice Oseman began publishing their story online in 2016. Now available to buy as a series of four graphic novels—with a fifth and final volume due to be released in December 2023. If you can't wait we recommend five more books like Heartstopper.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe
🏆 Winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Winner of Winners Prize, which aims to pick out the best nonfiction book of the past 25 years
“It’s an extraordinary book. He’s writing of extraordinary things, but that alone won’t make it a good book. There’s incredible artistry in putting this story together. And because he has a very transparent style—he’s a New Yorker staff writer—and it’s not fancy, it’s very easy to say, ‘Well, he just had to research it and write it down.’ But no, it’s incredibly beautifully done. It’s about the Sackler scandal, this family that’s made a fortune out of Oxycontin, this very, very addictive opioid that’s killed more Americans than have died in all the wars the country has fought since the Second World War. What he does is go back and look at the origins of the company, Purdue Pharma. It’s a fascinating story. It’s an immigrant family, Russian Jewish. The father has a grocer’s shop. They work incredibly hard. Against all the odds the three boys, the first generation, all become doctors. It is the American dream. They’re doing something extraordinary and it’s admirable at the start.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Kathryn Hughes, Literary Scholar
Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul
by Charles King
Midnight at the Pera Palace is a nonfiction book by Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University. It's about one of the most fascinating cities in the world, Istanbul, still known officially as Constantinople in the period the book covers. The Pera Palace is the hotel where many foreigners stayed, but also Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The book is about the tumultuous period when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the Turkish Republic was declared. It's an unlikely book to have a Netflix series based on it, and the series bears little relation to the book, except the title and the focus on the hotel, which you can still stay at today.
“It’s very cool. I think it’s better known in the United States because of the splash he made with a book called American Born Chinese.” Read more...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian
Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
🏆 Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, follows the life of an acerbic retired schoolteacher and her husband in a small coastal town in Maine. Olive is refreshingly not a people-pleaser. The novel has been made into an award-winning TV series starring Frances McDormand. The unsentimental journey of Olive Kitteridge continues in Olive Again which was published in 2019.
“Patricia Highsmith is known for being one of the greatest psychological thriller writers of all time. The plot for Strangers on a Train is not as complicated as you might think it would otherwise be. But it’s really driven by the characterisations of the main protagonists.” Read more...
David Baldacci, Novelist
The Cuckoo's Calling
by Robert Galbraith
The Cuckoo's Calling introduces Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling's detective Cormoran Strike. How does he compare to other literary detectives? In our experience, there are (broadly) two types of literary detective. The first type are patently ludicrous, but a lot of fun. Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are among the best known examples, but Simon Brett's Charles Paris or MC Beaton's Agatha Raisin are also wonderfully ridiculous detectives. The second type aim to be 'real' characters. We are still expected to suspend disbelief, but there's a basic aim to make a believable character we can identify with. In that aim, crime novelists rarely succeed. One detective might like jazz, another poetry, but they're pretty generic. Not so Cormoran Strike. He is a memorable detective, with a character that sticks with you (in our mind, he looks like the actor Robbie Coltrane).
As the first in the series, The Cuckoo's Calling is one of the best, also introducing Robin Ellacott, the Yorkshire woman who starts the book as Strike's temp. In the audiobook, actor Robert Glenister is excellent at narrating her Yorkshire accent and, like Strike, she seems like a real person.
“Pieces of Her not only has an explosive, intriguing plot, but the characters are what makes it such a standout novel and classic Slaughter. There’s a reason she’s considered one of the greatest crime writers in the world.” Read more...
Anthony Franze, Thriller and Crime Writer
Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl, the bestselling thriller by Gillian Flynn, is a lot of fun to listen to as an audiobook. The plot does degenerate somewhere along the line, but by then you’ve had so many hours of suspenseful listening already, it’s hard to be too exasperated with the author for not holding it together.
Narrator: Julia Whelan, Kirby Heyborne
Length: 19 hours and 18 minutes
“When I was doing the research, one of the things that I discovered early on was that there were going to be a number of unsolved crimes and thus unknowables. So, there were different ways to deal with that. You could try to minimise them, but I think that’s really…not going to bring you to the truth or the reality. Instead, you could make that unknowability part of the very fabric of the story—which is that we all have partial information. Facts elude us. And going back to what you were saying, one of the things that struck me in doing the research for the book was that I had always thought of crime stories as the horror of what you know. But in writing The Killers of the Flower Moon there were so many unsolved cases—cases for which there is still no accounting and in which the evidence has dried up or disappeared. The horror in many cases is the unknowability. To me that was very scary because that gets, again, at the very question of what we’re driving at in these detective stories, trying to impose some order and meaning on the world. But what if the order isn’t perfect or complete? That is something I wrestle with, because, in some ways, the most terrifying thing is when Sherlock Holmes can’t put it all back together again.” Read more...
David Grann, Journalist
“I actually came to this book because I saw the movie when I was 14 years old, when it first came out in the theatres. In the Black community, it was such an event to go see this film, because it was the first time in recent history that a story about Black women was being told this way on the big screen. I went with my cousin. She and I watched it and we cried like babies at the heartbreaking moments of the film. I didn’t even know who Alice Walker was, or that it was based on a book. When I found that out, I thought, ‘I have to read that book!’ I read it and fell in love all over again with those characters, because I got to know them so much better in the book.” Read more...
Best Books by Black Queer Writers
Robert Jones Jr., Novelist
“Moneyball was published right before I wrote Mindset and it showed that the fixed mindset was alive and well in the world of sports. You would think that the relationship between training and skill would be utterly obvious in sports, but apparently it isn’t. Many of the baseball scouts described in the book really thought they could look at superficial physical features of baseball players and know who had the potential to be a superstar. It’s the sports version of craniometry.” Read more...
The best books on Mindset and Success
Carol Dweck, Psychologist
“I find the darkness in le Carré particularly interesting because it’s quite melancholic. It evokes a sadness about Britain and the establishment at that time. There’s a sense of the world closing in. He really captures that in the book.” Read more...
Andy Beckett, Journalist
“Testament of Youth is simply one of the finest, most heart-rending and most moving memoirs – not just of the Great War, but of any conflict…Over the course of the war, Vera becomes a nurse and goes from being this protected middle-class Edwardian girl to dealing with the dead and the dying for months on end. She would lose, one by one, her two best friends from university, her fiancé, and finally her brother. Testament of Youth is really the most powerful account of that transformation from innocence to experience and her transformation, of course, in so many ways echoes that of Britain itself.” Read more...
The best books on Legacies of World War One
Wade Davis, Anthropologist
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Published in 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale is a haunting epistolary novel narrated by Offred, a woman living in a future America where environmental and societal breakdown have led to the establishment of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. In Gilead, women have been stripped of their fundamental rights and reduced to their reproductive potential. Lesbians and other 'gender outlaws' are executed, as are doctors who conduct abortions.
The Handmaid's Tale was recognised as a modern classic and first adapted into a film in 1990. It reappeared in the headlines (and the bestseller lists) in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s US electoral victory, after which time the handmaid's bonnet became an icon of the feminist protest movement. More recently it was adapted as a multi-Emmy Award-winning television series starring Elisabeth Moss, who also narrates the audiobook of The Handmaid's Tale.
The sequel to The Handmaid's Tale is The Testaments, set 15 years later.
“I started off with a sense of Sense and Sensibility as a rather stereotypical novel – very much like a lot of 18th century novels that I’ve read. There is a good sister and a bad sister, and the bad sister gets reformed and everybody lives happily ever after. But as I kept rereading it, I started to realise that it is actually a very dark novel, probably the darkest of Jane Austen’s novels.” Read more...
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Literary Scholar
“It’s…a very, very passionate book. It was one of the first big works of literature to describe sexuality fully, very arousingly, and also to celebrate sexuality between classes. Because there was a whole lot of other social change at that time, particularly in Europe. We were moving from a very structured, hierarchical society to a much more equal society. Having sex up and down the classes was very new and very revolutionary. So it’s a beautiful book to read—the love between them is brilliant—but it’s also legally and sociologically a very important book.” Read more...
Susan Quilliam, Psychologist
“Queer writers banded together and were like: we want to be happy in books. We want to show hope. Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston did this particularly well. That was a pivotal one. I saw Casey recently and they referred to the book as ‘cotton candy,’ which I feel categorizes it pretty well. Even something as simple as the pastel colors of the book itself—I think Red, White, and Royal Blue focused mainly on the enjoyment of falling in love.” Read more...
Aaron Aceves, Novelist
“It’s an immensely courageous book for such a famous author to write. It’s written from the perspective of the warder, whose job is to supervise death row and the execution of prisoners. The story is ultimately about a guy called John Coffey, a Christ-like figure who gets executed.It’s a magical realist book in some ways, but in other ways it’s an intensely realistic book about many of the aspects of death row. It’s set in the thirties, in 1932 I think. Conditions are a bit different these days but the process of execution is very similar. I came at this book with a prejudice because, although I think he’s a brilliant writer, I hate scary books of the type that Stephen King often writes. My prejudices were proven very wrong.” Read more...
The best books on Capital Punishment
Clive Stafford Smith, Lawyer
“You Are What You Watch is all about the science of how pop culture impacts the world as a whole—whether that’s our society, our minds, our identities. Whether seeing somebody have a gay relationship in Heartstopper sparks something in you, whether I Kill Giants allows you to cope with grief or stress, these things leave us fundamentally changed in a way that, historically, we haven’t given them enough credit for. In the book, I try to explore all the different ways in which our society—our science, our military, our minds, our bodies, our psychology, how we see the world and the people within it—is affected by things like this. Time and time again, we have seen movies act as mechanisms for empathy. Various studies have been conducted in individual capacities showing that.” Read more...
The Best Graphic Novels That Were Made into Movies
Walt Hickey, Journalist
“Nimona is the work of ND Stevenson, who went on to co-create Lumberjanes. He is extremely talented. He has been the showrunner, developer, and executive producer of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. He’s a classic rising star within art and animation. Nimona was his first book. He did it as a thesis. This is such a cool thing about how creative work is done today: you can go back on ND Stevenson’s Tumblr from 2012 through 2014 and see him come up with the idea for this book, develop these characters, sketch them out, and develop a comic about them. It’s a compelling book. It’s a little bit about queerness; it’s about identity. The main character is a shapeshifter and works with people who potentially have different morals and values than she does to take on the Institute, a big bad imperial and fascist apparatus. It is a charming, pretty, very good-looking book. It is visually innovative and it’s visually striking.” Read more...
The Best Graphic Novels That Were Made into Movies
Walt Hickey, Journalist
“I will tell you straight up right now, of all the things that I am recommending on this list, this is one of the most searing and beautiful and compelling and interesting short stories that I have ever read. It is a magnificently drawn, beautiful limited series. There’s a genuine chance that as I describe some of the plot elements to you, I’m going to cry. It’s about a girl who lives by the sea. She is a bit of an outsider. Every night she takes her big hammer and goes out to the sea and fights and kills giants. It’s very much a fantasy construction that is getting her through some interesting and difficult times. My voice is cracking because this is one of the best and most emotionally resonant books that I’ve ever read.” Read more...
The Best Graphic Novels That Were Made into Movies
Walt Hickey, Journalist
“Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a manga comic written in the eighties by Hayao Miyazaki, who would go on to become an acclaimed director. It would inspire his early feature-length film of the same name, which would go on to lay the groundwork not just for Studio Ghibli, not just for Japanese animation, but, I would argue, for animation in general, and for so much of what we’ve been able to see that medium accomplish over time.” Read more...
The Best Graphic Novels That Were Made into Movies
Walt Hickey, Journalist
Watchmen
by Alan Moore
Watchmen isn’t about specific superheroes so much as archetypes. It’s set in an alternative 1985, overshadowed by the threat of nuclear war
The Best Graphic Novels That Were Made into Movies, recommended by Walt Hickey
Transforming a graphic novel into a movie might seem straightforward, but not everything that works on the page makes sense on the screen. Walt Hickey, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting, recommends five outstanding comics that were turned into films—with varying degrees of fidelity, and varying degrees of success.
