Books Made Into Movies in 2024
Last updated: March 26, 2025
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.
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
“If you’ve grown up in the UK, Gerry Adams and other prominent Republicans, will be familiar figures. But seeing them rendered like this, we get an incredibly intimate view of the movement and how and why people got involved. It doesn’t shy away from the brutality, and you get a very clear view of the complicity of the British state. It does that, again, through close personal retellings. So it’s wide, but also focused. You move between different people who were affected and involved. It’s very vivid, very gripping, and illuminates a familiar and very close part of history, at least for those of us living in the UK.” Read more...
The Best Narrative Nonfiction Books
Samira Shackle, Journalist
“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
The Three-Body Problem
by Cixin Liu
The American screen adaptation of The Three-Body Problem became available on Netflix in March 2024—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 is compelling.
“This book was actually written in 2006, but not translated into English until 2014. We now have the complete trilogy in English, as well as a Netflix adaptation, and it’s a big name among sci fi fans. Much of the book is spent guessing at the bigger-picture plot, so I don’t want to give too much of that away… The guessing happens in the company of nanotechnologist Wang Miao and detective Shi Qiang, who are investigating the multiple suicides of prominent scientists. In the course of their investigations, they play a VR game called ‘Three Body’.” Read more...
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
“What García Márquez does is tell a story of the history and culture of Latin America from the point of view of the ordinary person. He manages to do that through this deadpan narrator who can mix the savagely real with the wonderful, and narrate a family saga which is also a history of Latin America. This book really put Latin American literature on the international map because it is a novel which, while deeply Latin American, is also accessible to all readers.” Read more...
The Best Latin American Novels
John King, Literary Scholar
“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
“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.
“Frank Herbert’s saga has so many different parallels in various philosophies in the history of the world. It’s huge, sweeping, vast, with so many different characters. Obviously, there’s allegorical connections to the Christian Bible and to several other hero-saviour journeys in various faiths around the world. So already, the book itself is carrying huge weight. The books have been around for such a long time that there are people who name their children after some of these characters. And so you’re given the task of narrating the book. What do you do at that point?” Read more...
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.
“The idea that you want him to succeed even though he’s a psychopath is a real feat of literary genius. Because if anyone put that in a synopsis, you’d think, ‘That’s not going to work.’ Even though every part of your moral consciousness is telling you that it’s wrong, there you are thinking, ‘I want you to get away with this, I want it to go your way.’ To get us, as the reader, to empathize with somebody who is such a horrific, damaged person is just such brilliant writing.” Read more...
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.
