8 Books That Would Make Great Movies

Athena McKenzie | June 13th, 2016

It’s no secret that the best of the big—and small—screens often start as books. Let these eight page turners inspire your summer film fantasies.

1. The Loney by Andrew Hurley is true gothic horror that Stephen King has called “amazing.” Suspending the reader between the strange and the supernatural, it follows a family’s annual pilgrimage to a desolate strip of British coast, a place gripped by the mystery of the local priest’s death.

2. Soft in the Head by Marie-Sabine Roger is the perfect summer project for a book club. The touching tale of an unusual friendship between a layabout and a much older woman is translated from the French novel adapted to the screen as My Afternoons with Margueritte starring Gérard Depardieu.

3. The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin is his highly anticipated conclusion to The Passage Trilogy. Think civilization-ending virus, vampires—the non-glittery kind—a band of survivors and a girl who can save the world. Ridley Scott has already scooped film rights, but this deserves the full Game of Thrones treatment.

4. Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler revisits Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The timeless quality of the Bard’s work makes his plays prime fodder for updates, and Tyler, a Pulitzer Prize- winning master of the craft herself, delivers a modern tale ripe for a film adaptation.

5. Everybody Behaves Badly by Lesley Blume carries the promising subtitle, “The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.” From the larger-than-life personalities to the complicated romantic entanglements to the tantalizing details of the author’s formative trip to Spain, it’s a fascinating look at Hemingway’s early career and the lost generation.

6. In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware was an instant bestseller in the U.K. and the U.S., and now its thrills are available in Canada. A hen party in the English countryside takes a dark turn when the women realize they are not alone. But when party-goer Nora wakes later in the hospital, she’s wondering not “what happened?” but “what have I done?”

7. The Girls by Emma Cline scored a $2 million advance and centres on a lonely teen drawn to a cool group of girls who will soon become infamous as a cult with a charismatic male leader, inspired by the story of the Manson family.

8. Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo catches up with the small-town characters in Nobody’s Fool, endeared to the world at large by the 1994 film adaptation starring Paul Newman and featuring Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the bumbling policeman—the central character of this new book.

A version of this article appeared in the July/August issue with the headline, “Source Material,” p. 17.