Dear Hollywood, Please Adapt These 16 Books

So many Oscars nominations just waiting to happen.

1. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Granta

This brand new novel from the youngest winner of the Booker Prize, is part eco-thriller, part scathing social satire, and entirely unputdownable. It's set in a remote New Zealand town (just think of the beautiful panoramic shots) and follows a guerrilla gardening group who get entangled with a suspicious American billionaire over an abandoned farm – the former wants to use it for illegal planting, the latter wants it for his end-times bunker. It's the stuff of movie gold.

2. Happy Place by Emily Henry

Penguin

If there's one thing I love, it's a good rom-com and this book has all the potential to be adapted into a great one. Its central couple, Harriet and Wyn, have already had their happily ever after – they met in college and fell in love – except that now they don't. `

They broke up six months ago but still haven't told their friends. This is how they end up sharing the largest bedroom at the cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Cue escalating lies, hilarious situations, and lots of sexual tension. Big The Wedding Date and The Proposal vibes.

3. This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Cornerstone

The latest work from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding is inspired by the real-life story of Malaga, an island off the coast of Maine that was once the home of a mixed-race fishing community until the island’s inhabitants were evicted by the state in 1912. 

In the book, Malaga becomes Apple Island, and explores the lives of formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, their descendants and the eccentric neighbours who have joined them over the years, and what happens when eugenics-minded state officials decide to "cleanse" the island. The lyrical, empathetic style of a director like Barry Jenkins would be a perfect pairing for translating it onto the big screen.

4. Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

Granta

This gothic horror story would make an incredible surrealist movie along the lines of a Guillermo del Toro masterpiece. The first novel to be translated into English by the International Booker Prize, the plot follows a young father and son who set out on a road trip, after the death of the wife and mother they both loved. 

After travelling to her ancestral home, they're confronted by a family that commits horrendous acts as part of a quest for immortality. Oh, and the dad can talk with the dead and the demonic, and it's all set between the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and London in the swinging 1960s. 

5. The Chinese Groove by Kathryn Ma

Counterpoint

Adapting this brilliant book would be a necessary addition to the lexicon of films about the oft-trod immigrant journey in search of the American Dream. It tells the story of an overly optimistic Chinese man (eighteen-year-old Shelley) who migrates to America to find success, only to discover that it's not a "rich uncle" waiting for him but an unemployed second cousin and a comedy of errors. It's sharp, funny, heartwarming and optimistic and the role of Shelley is practically made for Hudson Yang.

6. A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe

Faber

The 1966 Aberfan landslide was brought back into focus after it was featured in the third season of The Crown. More attention should be brought to this horrifying tragedy, and a screen adaption of this beautifully written Welsh novel would help do that. In it, nineteen-year-old William decides to volunteer at the school after the landslide hits, working as an embalmer. Though grounded in tragedy, the story is ultimately one of compassion and how healing it can be.

7. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Bloomsbury Publishing

In this novel, you get to know the fictional Vivian Morris, a 95-year-old women, and the life she has led. It's been quite a life: in 1940 she gets kicked out of school aged 19 and moves to Manhattan to live with an eccentric aunt who owns a fabulous but decaying midtown theatre. There are showgirls, grand-dame actresses, and of course, *scandal*. A film adaption would be sexy, historical, and maybe feel like a 1940s version of my all-time fave 2010 flick, Burlesque.

8. Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Random House

Salman Rushdie, despite being one of the greatest novelists of our time, is perhaps more of a stranger to film adaptation than he should be. Only one of Rushdie’s novels (Midnight's Children) has ever been adapted for the silver screen, and even then it took over thirty years for it to reach the cinema. A large part of the reason for this is the difficulty in translating Rushdie's magical realism into cinema. 

But hopefully, someone will make the effort with Rushdie's latest work: an epic tale that begins in fourteenth-century India and follows a girl who is tasked by the goddess Parvati to give women agency in a patriarchal world. The girl, Pampa Kampana, creates a city (Bisnaga) out of a bag of magic seeds and the novel follows both Pampa and Bisnaga's journey. It's epic, fantastical, and hopefully with the help of modern CGI, not impossible to turn into a movie. 

9. The Wall by John Lanchester

Faber & Faber

The UK has provided plenty of great dystopian novels to Hollywood for adaption. 1984, The Girl with All the Gifts, and Never Let Me Go to name but a few. The Wall is another that should be added to that list pronto. The book is set on an island after something called 'the Change' has led them to build the Wall, a giant concrete barrier around its entire coastline. 'Defenders' protect their section of the Wall from 'Others', AKA desperate people seeking refuge from the world's changing climate. It's a bleak but brilliant story and incredibly easy to imagine as a post-apocalyptic film.

10. Milkman by Anna Burns

Faber & Faber

Another horrifyingly addictive dystopian work is Milkman, which transports the Northern Irish troubles to a nameless city populated by anonymous citizens. It follows a teenage girl's struggle under the attention of an increasingly psychopathic paramilitary while rewriting contemporary history as a dystopia. It's as funny as it is furious, and easily imagined as a movie that sits somewhere between the Divergent series and 1984.

11. Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

Penguin Press

If you're addicted to Succession, this is literally the real-life version. This non-fiction work tells the inside story of Paramount Global, the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire controlled by the Redstone family – and the twisting power struggles within it that eventually threatened to bring the whole company tumbling down. Tell me all of that isn't begging to be made into a TV series – especially given this season of Succession will be the last.

12. Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages by Carmela Ciuraru

Harper

The 2017 film, The Wife, told the story of a fictional literary wife slowly sucked dry by a narcissistic husband, so bringing the stories of real-life 'literary wives' to the screen feels like a logical next step. 

This non-fiction work studies five unique 'literary marriages' and how they shaped the lives of the wives within them, from Roald Dahl's glamorous wife Patricia Neal to the American wife of legendary British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, to the successful relationship of a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall.

13. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Vintage Digital

At first glance, you might think this tale of two children who meet in a hospital is going to be a romance, but it's not. After Sadie and Sam meet in a hospital room in 1987 they bond over a shared love of video games. Eight years later they reconnect, but rather than this becoming yet another love story (the obvious route), they start working together creating what they love: video games. 

Imagine a film that goes beyond just the expected boy meets girl romance, to actually explore the human need to connect and the depths of creative partnership? Adapting this book would give us just that.

14. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

Manilla Press

Finally – finally – we're getting a stage adaption of this soaringly beautiful novel this year, with a production going on tour in the UK this year. But the story of Nuri, a beekeeper, and his wife, Afra, an artist's journey from their previously peaceful home; the city of Aleppo; is one that deserves its own film adaption too. 

15. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Picador

All you have to do is know the concept of this book to realise what an incredible movie this would make. Down a small back alley in Tokyo lies a cafe that's been serving coffee for over a hundred years – and the opportunity to time travel. You just have to return before your coffee gets cold. 

16. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Vintage

The demand for a movie adaption of this beloved novel about a 15-year-old boy on the autism spectrum investigating the death of a neighbour's dog is overwhelming: frankly it's amazing it's not happened already. A theatrical adaptation won the Tony Award for Best Play, and the West End version was filmed for National Theatre Live, but we're still waiting on a big screen adaption even though the film rights were sold years ago.