Books Made Into Movies in 2023
Last updated: April 10, 2024
As filmmakers continue to turn to books to inspire new movies, we've put together a list of books that have been recommended on Five Books that have appeared on the screen this year or are currently in production. Some are brand new, others, like Dracula by Bram Stoker, have already had multiple outings, and the latest movie focuses on just a single chapter. Notable is the number of nonfiction books being turned into movies, an indication of how many books are currently being published that tell compelling stories that happen, also, to be true.
“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
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.
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.
“American Prometheus by Bird and Sherwin is the gold standard for books about Oppenheimer. It’s the definitive Oppenheimer biography—and I say that as the author of one myself.” Read more...
Books about J Robert Oppenheimer (to Read After the Movie)
Mark Wolverton, Science Writer
A Hallowe'en Party/A Haunting in Venice (1969)
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."
“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...
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.
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
“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
“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
“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
