The best films based on books

As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders – two men and a dangerously magnetic woman – arrives on the woodland borders, triggering a series of events that will see Walter Thirsk's village unmade in just seven days: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, cruel punishment meted out to the innocent, and allegations of witchcraft. But something even darker is at the heart of Walter's story, and he will be the only man left to tell it.

This critically acclaimed 2017 novel is a startlingly beautiful story of a family's survival; a haunting but hopeful dystopian vision of a familiar world made dangerous and unstable. As apocalyptic floods submerge London, a woman gives birth to her first child. Soon the family are forced to flee in search of safety, moving from place to place on a journey of fear and wonder, as the baby grows and thrives against the odds. Megan Hunter's beautiful, spare prose paints an imagined future which is terrifying in its realism.

Cast aside by his family at an early age, abandoned and left to fend for himself in the woods of Washington State, young Joe Rantz turns to rowing as a way of escaping his past. What follows is an extraordinary journey, as Joe and eight other working-class boys exchange the sweat and dust of life in 1930s America for the promise of glory at the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. Stroke by stroke, a remarkable young man strives to regain his shattered self-regard, to dare again to trust in others – and to find his way back home.

Alex Claremont-Diaz is handsome, charismatic, a genius – pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House ever since his mother first became President of the United States. He has, unfortunately, just been captured in the British tabloids having a fight with Henry, the Prince of Wales. As relations between the two countries falter, the two men are forced into a state-dictated performative truce which requires them to spend a lot of time together. . .

There's nothing like the shock of recognition, the relief that comes with realising you're not the first or only person who feels like this, that comes from reading Judy Blume. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret is a bold, empathetic exploration of what it's like being a teenage girl who feels that they don't quite fit in. Originally published in 1970, it's a timeless YA classic.

Possibly DeLillo’s funniest book, White Noise introduced his work to a wider audience than ever before and established his reputation as a master of postmodern fiction.

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. The novel is a story about his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear – his own mortality. DeLillo's bestselling story effortlessly combines social satire and metaphysical dilemma, exposing our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism.

After fleeing her native Syria to the Turkish coast in 2015, Yusra Mardini boarded a small dinghy full of refugees headed for Greece. On the journey, the boat's engine cut out. It started to sink. Seventeen-year-old Yusra, her sister, and two others took to the water to push the overcrowded boat for three and a half hours in open water. Eventually, they managed to land on Lesbos, with Yusra and the others having saved the lives of those on board. 

Butterfly is Yusra Mardini's journey from war-torn Damascus to Berlin and from there to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games as a swimmer competing in the 100m butterfly. A UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and one of People magazine's 25 Women Changing the World, discover Yusra and her incredible story of resilience and unstoppable spirit.

In 1850s Ireland, rumour spreads of an eleven-year-old girl, Anna, who has lived for months without food. A nurse, sent to see if Anna is a fraud, collides with a journalist on the hunt for a story. Together, they could be experiencing a miracle. Or they could be watching a child being murdered in slow motion in front of their eyes.

You can read more about the real cases that inspired the book in this piece by its author, Emma Donoghue. 

As addictive as Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, Luckiest Girl Alive tells the story of Ani FaNelli – successful, glamorous and hoping to prove it through a documentary showing how well she has survived the traumatic events of her high school years. But can Ani maintain her shiny exterior? Or will her past come back to haunt her?

Shaggy Beard wishes to take me to wife! What a monstrous joke. That dog assassin whose breath smells like the mouth of Hell, who makes wind like others make music, who is so ugly and old!

Catherine's in trouble, caught between a mother who is determined to turn her into the perfect medieval lady and a father who wants her to marry her off to a much older and utterly repulsive suitor. Luckily, Catherine has a plan. She has experience outwitting suitors and is ready to take matters into her own hands. A vibrant coming-of-age novel about a fourteen-year-old girl's fight for freedom and right to self-determination in medieval England.

Thousands of teenagers around the world have fallen in love with Marmee and her four daughters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. This semi-autobiographical novel charts the highs and lows of the four sisters as they navigate their way from childhood to adulthood during the American Civil War.

The off-beat, gentle story of Pat – just home from psychiatric hospital, trying to be positive and hoping to reconcile with his wife. Pat moves in with his parents, who have been doing their best to protect him, but the secrets they've been keeping start to come out when he meets the mysterious Tiffany. 

Partly modelled on Dickens’s own experiences, David Copperfield follows the eponymous hero from childhood struggles to a successful career as a novelist. This is one of Dickens’s most energetic and enjoyable novels, and the one he called his ‘favourite child’.

A heart-wrenching adventure novel that follows Buck, a powerful St. Bernard-Scotch Shepherd dog, from his happy life in the Canadian valleys to becoming a sled dog in Alaska. Extraordinary both for the vividness of its descriptions and the success with which it imagines life from a non-human perspective, this classic of children’s literature is one of greatest and most popular animal stories ever written. 

The only official autobiography of the enduringly successful singer/songwriter, Me is just as funny, scandalous, dramatic and packed with rock ‘n’ roll anecdotes as you would hope. A gloriously candid and powerfully moving memoir by a living legend, it documents his childhood in Pinner and struggles to find success, to the years selling out stadiums as a chart-topping superstar while his drug addiction spiraled out of control. 

If you find clowns unsettling, then this novel may well be why. Its terrifying central force – horror harlequin, Pennywise – has become so embedded in our collective psyches you don't need to have actually read the book to be frightened of him. This novel, in two parts, tells of the fear and devastation he brings to the young residents of a Maine town. The real horror, though, lies in the adult population's strange almost-acquiescence to the harm being done to their children.

Previously published as Stories of Your Life and Others, the story collection that includes Arrival was, incredibly, Ted Chiang's first. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the heavens above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang's exhilarating science-fiction is moving and evocative.  

For five-year-old Jack, there’s TV and there’s ‘in real’, and ‘in real’ begins and ends with Room, the ten foot by ten foot space where he lives alone with his Ma. It is hard not to experience a visceral, even physical, response to the events of Room, a profoundly upsetting and somehow also wonderful story of maternal love and survival. Featuring one of the most distinctive narrative voices you’ll ever read and one of the most amazing mothers ever written, this is sure to be a literary fixture for future generations.

On the surface, Patrick Bateman is living the dream: a job as a stockbroker, dinner dates every night at the latest restaurant in town, a string of admirers – aided by his charm and good looks. But behind the pristine façade lurks a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial life, Bateman pulls us into a dark underworld where the American Dream turns to nightmare. One of the most controversial novels of all time, American Psycho is a disturbingly brilliant black satire about the darkest side of human nature.

This collection of stories conjures a world of prizefighters, gamblers and sex addicts; dogs fighting to the death and bare-knuckled men fighting for survival. But it's tempered by gentleness, the quiet understanding in the most intimate relationships. Where human vulnerability is so close to the surface, the humanity of these characters heralds redemption and hope.

A startling depiction of a future without hope. In a burned-out America, a father and his young son walk to the coast. They have no idea what, if anything, awaits them there. The landscape is destroyed, nothing moves save the ash on the wind and cruel, lawless men stalk the roadside, lying in wait. Attempting to survive in this brave new world, the young boy and his protector have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves. They must keep walking.

The true story of a secret unit established in 1979 by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known military practice – and indeed the laws of physics – they believed that a soldier could adopt a cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Jon Ronson went to meet them.  

Pages, 336. Loud snorts done on public transport while in company of book, lost count.

Take the plot of Pride and Prejudice, transfer it to nineties London and have it narrated by a regularly-drunk, chain-smoking Elizabeth Bennett called Bridget and you have this hilarious, often-copied but never-bettered bestseller. 

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go. Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma, a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

It's never safe to go back in the water.

It was just another day in the life of a small Atlantic resort until the terror from the deep came to prey on unwary holiday makers. The first sign of trouble – a warning of what was to come – took the form of a young woman's body, or what was left of it, washed up on the long, white stretch of beach. . .

Set mostly in Arizona and L.A., Drive is, according to author James Sallis, "about a guy who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night. In classic noir fashion, he is double-crossed and, though before he has never participated in the violence ('I drive. That's all.'), he goes after the ones who double-crossed and tried to kill him."

Hunting for antelope near the Rio Grande, Llewelyn Moss comes across a transaction that has gone badly wrong. Discovering bodies ridden with bullets, kilos of hard drugs and a stash of cash, Llewelyn faces a difficult choice – should he leave the scene as is, or take the money and run? The decision he makes will change his life for ever.

Father Rodrigues sets sail for Japan on a determined mission to help the brutally oppressed Japanese Christians and to discover the truth behind unthinkable rumours that his famous teacher Ferreira has renounced his faith. Once faced with the realities of religious persecution Rodrigues himself is forced to make an impossible choice: whether to abandon his flock or his God.

Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as 'Human Computers', calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these women used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. This is their story. 

Five-year-old Saroo lived in a poor village in India, in a one-room hut with his mother and three siblings. until the day he boarded a train alone and got lost. For twenty-five years. This is the story of what happened to him. How he ended up on the streets of Calcutta. And survived. How he then ended up in Tasmania, living the life of an upper-middle-class Aussie. And how, at thirty years old, with some dogged determination, a heap of good luck and the power of Google Earth, he found his way back home.