Books Being Made Into Movies in 2024
Last updated: September 26, 2024
Adapting a brilliant book for the screen is something filmmakers have been doing for decades, and 2024 is no exception. Below, we've put together a list of books that have been recommended on Five Books that are appearing on the screen in 2024. Some, like The Talented Mr Ripley and Dune, have already had multiple outings as films. Others are newly adapted. As in 2023, the year's screen adaptations include nonfiction books—an indication of how many books are currently being published that tell compelling stories that happen, also, to be true.
“It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, boy is wrongly imprisoned for many years, boy escapes, discovers enormous fortune on mysterious Mediterranean island, boy exacts revenge on the people who locked him up in the first place. It was a lockdown read for me: it’s 1200 closely-typed pages, and surprisingly thrilling given how long it is.” Read more...
Novels of the Rich and Wealthy
Andrew Hunter Murray, Comedians & Humorist
Dissolution: A Novel of Tudor England
by C.J. Sansom
Dissolution is book 1 of C.J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake mystery series, set during the English Reformation
“Shardlake is a lawyer…In Dissolution his job is to go around all the dissolved monasteries to check out what they’re doing and take notes on what’s happening. He discovers a murder… but you’re not thinking, ‘This is a murder mystery.’ You’re thinking, ‘I’m in the Tudor times, I’m looking through a window. I’m a silent witness to all of this’…They’re fantastic stories. The series is one long chronicle if you like. He’s written seven so far.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
Shōgun
by James Clavell
Shōgun, a 10-part mini-series, started streaming on Disney+ on February 27th, 2024. It’s excellent so far (and a big improvement on the 1980 mini-series)
“I was 15, I think, when I read it. I couldn’t believe that no one had ever written other books like it. I remember going to my English master at school and saying ‘What else is like this? I want to read more books like this!’ I can’t remember what he recommended, but I can remember picking them up and thinking they were nothing like Shogun. I was so entranced by the world of the 16th century he created that I’ve really had a fascination for it all my life.” Read more...
The best books on Life in the Tudor Era
Ian Mortimer, Historian
The Leopard
by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
No announcement yet when the Netflix series based on The Leopard (1958) will appear on our screens. The historical drama will star Italian actor and director Kim Rossi Stuart as the aging Sicilian aristocrat, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina.
“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
The Three-Body Problem
by Cixin Liu
The American screen adaptation of The Three-Body Problem became available on Netflix on March 21st—the first book in Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The combination of Cultural Revolution trauma and advanced physics make both compelling.
“In the first book of the trilogy, science basically stops working on Earth, and there’s a big puzzle as to why. Particle accelerators start giving random results, and a bunch of scientists commit suicide. It is then revealed that an alien civilisation is at the origin of those events. These aliens themselves are going through a systemic collapse, and they create an AI that they send across space to take control of another civilisation” Read more...
The best books on Existential Risks
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Scientist
“Viet Thanh Nguyen is a powerful new voice for the Vietnamese who left the country after the end of the war in 1975, mainly South Vietnamese who fled after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and settled in the US. The protagonist is half French, half Vietnamese. He’s a spy working undercover for the communists in Saigon and then in the US. When he returns to post-war communist Vietnam, he is imprisoned by his own side. The novel ends at sea with the narrator leaving Vietnam among a crowd of boat people. Viet Thanh Nguyen illustrates the complexity of divided loyalties that come from Vietnam’s history—from being a colony for 100 years, then at war for over 30 years, with families split between supporters of the North and supporters of the South.” Read more...
Sherry Buchanan, Journalist
Breathtaking
by Rachel Clarke
Breathtaking by Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor, is her memoir of working as a doctor during the COVID pandemic, and what it was like for staff as they battled to save people's lives in unimaginable conditions. Four of her colleagues lost their lives because they lacked critical protective equipment, and Clarke dedicates the book to them. The ITV series based on the memoir is also excellent.
Force of Nature
by Jane Harper
Force of Nature is Jane Harper's second crime novel featuring investigator Aaron Falk, following her bestselling debut, The Dry. These are crime novels set in Australia, sometimes referred to as 'outback noir.' In this book, five women go out hiking in the bush while on a company retreat.
“Dune is a big sprawling space opera. It is explicitly a political book: it’s about a revolution to overthrow an oppressive emperor, but also about a conflict between two military families, and how they run extractive industries on planets. It’s also about religion. And it’s about trying to build better people through genetic or psychoactive means – all of which make a lot of sense when you think about who wrote it, and when he wrote it. It’s hugely influential for me, as a writer, in terms of conceptualising complexity, and the way you can write a book about the moral injury of trying to work in geopolitics – about what kinds of psychologically horrific things can happen to a person, if they are trying to be a God Emperor, or trying to be a person with their hands on the wheel of fate.” Read more...
The Best Political Sci-Fi Books
Arkady Martine, Novelist
A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
A Gentleman in Moscow by American novelist Amor Towles is a quirky tale about a Russian aristocrat, Alexander Rostov, who in the years after the Russian Revolution finds himself under house arrest in a luxury hotel in Moscow (the Metropol) for more than three decades.
“It fascinates me that René Clément, the French film director, adapted this novel into a film called Plein Soleil (known as Purple Noon in the United States). In the story, Tom Ripley is sent from New York to Italy by the father of Dickie Greenleaf to bring Dickie back to the United States. As he ingratiates himself with his son, Tom Ripley adopts increasingly dangerous, amoral and murderous measures to reap the rewards of his lifestyle and finally, steal his inheritance. The novel starts in a gloomy Manhattan, where Ripley meets Dickie Greenleaf’s father. It’s not bright, it’s claustrophobic. And then we come to this Mediterranean world of plein soleil where in the movie everything is brightness—there’s a yacht, these lovely towns, and everybody is wearing lovely styles and costumes.” Read more...
The Best Book-to-Movie Adaptations
Peter Markham, Film Director
God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State
by Lawrence Wright
American author Lawrence Wright's book about 9/11, The Looming Tower, is one of our most frequently recommended books. God Save Texas is quite a different book—part memoir, part reportage, part travelogue about his home state, Texas.
It Ends with Us
by Colleen Hoover
It Ends with Us (2016) is Colleen Hoover's biggest selling romance novel. It includes themes of domestic violence inspired by Hoover's childhood experiences. It Ends with Us was followed by a sequel in 2022 that also became a bestseller, It Starts with Us.
