Last week in our regular You Be the Guide section of this here newsletter, we asked you to recommend books that would make for great film or TV adaptations. The response was massive: it turns out that, for all the books that were adapted into lousy movies or shows, there are just as many, if not more, great books crying out to adapted into (hopefully) great movies or shows.
So we’ve decided to devote this week’s newsletter to a bumper selection of your recommendations, along with some picks from our culture writers too. War epics, period romps, supernatural chillers: there are some terrific suggestions here that really should be getting optioned any second now – but even if they don’t, our list should hopefully double up as a helpful guide to some great new reads.
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Guardian picks
I’d love to see a film version of Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story Of A Financial Legend by Mitchell Zuckoff. It tells the story of Charles Ponzi, who arrived in the US as a penniless Italian immigrant in the 1920s, and went on to invent the Ponzi scheme, becoming the toast of greedy high society for his trick. It would be a great “charming sociopath” role for an actor like Jason Sudeikis. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian film critic
Maggie Shipstead’s huge, gorgeous novel Great Circle – about the life of a female aviator and the Hollywood star who is playing her in a biopic – was my favourite book of…
