Have you seen (insert film) yet?
No, but I’ve read the book.
Still Alice
by Lisa Genova
Soon to be a film starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart and Kate Bosworth
A moving and insightful story of a woman with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, now a major film starring Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart.
Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty, she’s a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a renowned expert in linguistics, with a successful husband and three grown children.
When she begins to grow forgetful and disoriented, she dismisses it for as long as she can until a tragic diagnosis changes her life – and her relationship with her family and the world around her – for ever.
Testament of Youth
by Vera Brittain
Soon to be a film starring Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Dominic West and Emily Watson
In 1914 Vera Brittain was eighteen and, as war was declared, she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life – and the life of her whole generation – had changed in a way that was unimaginable in the tranquil pre-war era.
Testament of Youth, one of the most famous autobiographies of the First World War, is Brittain’s account of how she survived the period; how she lost the man she loved; how she nursed the wounded and how she emerged into an altered world.
Wild
by Cheryl Strayed
Soon to be a film starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern
At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s rapid death from cancer, her family disbanded and her marriage crumbled.
With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America – from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington state – and to do it alone.
She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the journey was nothing more than a line on a map. But it held a promise – a promise of piecing together a life that lay in ruins at her feet.
American Sniper
by Chris Kyle
Soon to be a film starring Bradley Cooper and directed by Clint Eastwood
From 1999 to 2009, U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. Kyle earned legendary status among his fellow SEALs, Marines, and U.S. Army soldiers, whom he protected with deadly accuracy from rooftops and stealth positions.
Gripping and unforgettable, Kyle’s masterful account of his extraordinary battlefield experiences ranks as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time.
Alan Turing: The Enigma
by Andrew Hodges
Soon to be a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley
A nail-biting race against time following Alan Turing, the pioneer of modern-day computing and credited with cracking the German Enigma code, and his brilliant team at Britain’s top-secret code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II.
Turing, whose contributions and genius significantly shortened the war, saving thousands of lives, was the eventual victim of an unenlightened British establishment, but his work and legacy live on.
Inherent Vice
by Thomas Pynchon
Soon to be a film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon and Benicio del Toro
It’s the tail end of the psychedelic Sixties in L.A. Private eye Doc Sportello hasn’t seen his ex-girlfriend in a while, when suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer.
It all spells trouble to Doc, but before he knows it he is caught up in a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang.
Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand
Soon to be a film starring Jack O’Connell and directed by Angelina Jolie
On a May afternoon in 1943, a US bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean. After an agonising delay, a young lieutenant finally bobbed to the surface and struggled aboard a life raft.
So begins one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. As a boy, he turned to petty crime until he discovered a remarkable talent for running, which took him to the Berlin Olympics. But as war loomed, he joined up and was soon embroiled in the ferocious battle for the Pacific.
About the Contributor
Andrew Cattanach
Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.
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Comments
December 22, 2015 at 3:41 am
I always find it frustrating to see a book turned into a movie and like half the plot is missing or changed!