Books that have been adapted into movies
“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 at this time of homeschooling: 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.
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.
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.
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
“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
