Upcoming Books to Screen Reading List

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Towles’ 2016 novel is currently filming and will likely come out at the end of 2023 or early 2024. Ewan McGregor plays Count Alexander Rostov who, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, is kept under house arrest in at the Metropol Hotel across the street from the Kremlin, a sentence laid down by a Bolshevik tribunal. The book is developed into an 8-episode TV series on Amazon. Quite an original story idea and the dramatization will likely liven up the seemingly mundane life of the aristocrat banished to the servants quarter of a luxury hotel.

Caste: The Origin of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson

Oscar-nominated Ava DuVernay is producing, directing and writing the screen adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s critically acclaimed non-fiction work, using a multiple story structure to investigate the ‘unspoken system that has shaped America and chronicles how lives today are defined by a hierarchy of human divisions dating back generations.’ DuVernay has been a powerful filmmaker and spokesperson probing systemic inequality, the nation’s discriminatory past and present. Her works include Selma (2014), 13^th (2016), and When They See Us (2019). Caste will be a Netflix movie.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

The memoir of the lead musician of the indie pop band Japanese Breakfast is Goodreads Choice Awards for Memoir in 2022. Zauner movingly describes how she comes to terms with her identity as a Korean-American when she goes back to her root in Oregon to care for her mother suffering from terminal cancer. Music and food strengthen their bond. The actor in The White Lotus and director of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain Will Sharpe will direct. A casting call went out on Twitter to play Zauner on screen. Just a thought… Zauner could be a prime candidate to play herself.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Where there’s oil, there will be blood. One of the most-touted movies of 2023 is this adaptation of the non-fiction book by Grann, winner of the 2018 Edgar Award. Grann chronicles the discovery of oil in the Osage County in Oklahoma where several of the natives there were murdered. The Osage Murders is the newly created FBI’s first big case, with its young director J. Edgar Hoover rising to the challenge. Premiered at Cannes in May and under the helm of Martin Scorsese, with a superb cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Brandon Fraser, Jesse Plemon, John Lithgow, and Tantoo Cardinal, herself a highly decorated Canadian aboriginal actress, the movie will be nothing short of epic.

Mrs. March by Virginia Feito

Reads like a Patricia Highsmith psychological novel with a touch of mystery… in particular, Edith’s Diary. Suspense novels nowadays often feature an unreliable narrator stringing out a sequence of events and perceptions that blur the line between reality and the delusionary. Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss’s new production company is developing the movie and Moss will play the title character. I’ve listened to the audiobook and look forward to seeing how Moss portrays the internal multiverse of Mrs. March. The old classic The Three Faces of Eve (1957) comes to mind. Feito is writing the screenplay.

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

Ruskovich is an O. Henry Prize winner and this her debut novel has garnered praises on its originality, masterful language and imagery. A family spending a hot August day in an Idaho mountain collecting birch wood faces a fateful turn in their lives. A psychological thriller exploring dementia and its ripple effects. The New Yorker review has this powerful statement: ‘The book is also an affecting portrait of how love can endure when memory fails.’ This one is high on my TBR list. Another title Elizabeth Moss’s new production company is developing.  

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

2022 Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction. Here’s another example of some outstanding Asian American writers and artists not known for their mixed racial roots and identity but have approached the subject in their novels nonetheless. Zevin, whose mother is Korean and father Jewish, touches on such an issue from an original and fresh perspective: two young people meet in the real world of video game creation. I’ve listened to the audiobook and found it to be one of the most unique and interesting reads I’ve come across in recent years. Zevin’s other book The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is now streaming on various platforms.

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

British writer Martin Amis’s 2015 Walter Scott Prize winning novel is turned into a film directed by Jonathan Glazer. Premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and garnering the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize. The story is a macabre juxtaposition of horror and a love affair. The commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, and his wife strive to build an idyllic family home situated right next to the death camp. To add to the horrific irony and complexity, a Nazi official has an affair with the commandant’s wife. Critics have cited Amis’s book as a very different Holocaust novel, and the movie has now become a notable in the 2023 international awards circuit.

Emily Henry’s Books to Screen

For beach read fans, summer reading has to include Emily Henry’s novels. If you’re a fan of hers and like to see her works on screen, here’s the good news: all three of Henry’s popular books are in development into rom-coms:

People We Meet on Vacation  
The 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards for Romance Novel is to be directed by Brett Haley. Screenwriter Yulin Kuang’s adapted script has already received endorsement and high praise from Henry herself.

Book Lovers
Two years in a row, Henry won the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards for Romance with Book Lovers, perhaps a contemporary queen of the genre? Sarah Heyward is set to write the script, movie will be produced by Tango (Aftersun, 2022)

Beach Read
Just announced is that the Emmy nominated writer director Yulin Kuang, screenwriter for People We Meet on Vacation, is taking the helm to write and direct Beach Read, Henry’s third popular fiction to be transported onto screen. Contemporary rom-com, breezy, light, and… will it re-create the wave that Nora Ephron was once so well-known for?

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