Novels come alive on the big screen

Hollywood gets inspiration from good books. This year, there are many more film adaptations of novels which means it’s time to get reading. Here are a few suggestions, along with some intel on the movie version, by Nicole Y Chung

LITTLE WOMEN, BY LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1868)

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Meryl Streep, Timothée Chalamet, Laura Dern (and directed by Greta Gerwig)

Plot: The American classic of four teenage sisters growing up during the American Civil War. (Adapted repeatedly for movies and TV series.)

Our take on the novel: Alcott had a singular gift for creating what felt like a hermetic unit, where people were richly people, but also pulleys and levers, their individual actions influencing the other characters, and us as readers.

In theatres December 25.

PET SEMATARY, BY STEPHEN KING (1983)

Cast: John Lithgow, Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz

Plot: A doctor moves with his family to rural Maine, where they learn about a makeshift pet graveyard that gives dead animals a second life. (Previously adapted for a movie released in 1989.)

Our take on the novel: Pet Sematary is one of the most vivid, powerful and disturbing tales

King has written. His hallmarks – effortless, colloquial prose and an unerring instinct for the visceral – are in evidence, but this novel succeeds because of King’s ability to produce characters so familiar that they could be our neighbours.

In theatres April 5.

THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR, BY NICOLA YOON (2016)

Cast: Yara Shahidi, Charles Melton, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Jake Choi

Plot: Two teenagers meet and roam New York City. Natasha’s family is facing deportation to Jamaica. Daniel wants to escape the Ivy League medical track his father has planned for him. During their adventures, lives are changed.

Our take on the novel: The story is playful and tender, yes, but timely and penetrating as well. This wider view reminds us that actions can have a “rippling effect” upon the world.

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, BY AJ FINN (2018)

Cast: Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Wyatt Russell

Plot: An alcoholic, agoraphobic woman witnesses a neighbour’s murder and reports it to the police. But there’s no body and no evidence. (Full disclosure: A New Yorker exposé noted similarities between the book and the 1995 film Copycat. The book also owes an acknowledged debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Nevertheless, the novel was a hit.)

Our take on the novel: The Woman in the Window is first-rate entertainment and a moving portrait of a woman fighting to preserve her sanity.

In theatres October 4.

THE GOLDFINCH, BY DONNA TARTT (2013)

Cast: Sarah Paulson, Nicole Kidman, Ansel Elgort, Luke Wilson and Jeffrey Wright

Plot: Theo Decker survives a terrorist bombing in a museum at 13 and begins a life of strange adventures after stumbling from the museum with his slain mother’s favourite painting.

Our take on the novel: With a Dutch master’s attention to detail, Tartt has created a narrative voice that is simultaneously immediate and retrospective, filled with the boy’s adolescent anxieties and the man’s fermented despair.

THE AFTERMATH, BY RHIDIAN BROOK (2013)

Cast: Keira Knightley, Alexander Skarsgard, Jason Clarke, Kate Phillips

Plot: Loyalties are tested when a British colonel relocates to Hamburg in 1946 to oversee the rebuilding of the devastated city after World

War II. Instead of displacing the German family that lives in the house requisitioned for him and his family, the colonel lets them stay, and drama unfolds.

Our take on the novel: The situation is ripe for conflict and betrayals, and Brook provides enough of both to keep the plot moving.

In theatres March 15.

HOW TO BUILD A GIRL, BY CAITLIN MORAN (2014)

Cast: Emma Thompson, Chris O’dowd, Jameela Jamil, Alfie Allen and Beanie Feldstein

Plot: In an attempt to find a way to escape her dreary life, a British teen reinvents herself as hard-partying music critic Dolly Wilde.

Our take on the novel: But for all her humiliations – and there are plenty – Johanna is an irrepressible narrator, telling a mostly-true and funny tale of survival and success.

Release date to be announced.

| The Washington Post