10 Books We Wish Would Be Made Into Movies

Zadie Smith's 2005 novel is loosely based on E.M. Forster's novel Howards End. A story about the complications that arise between and among families, it's just waiting for the right ensemble to bring it to life on screen.

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Fannie Flagg's debut novel deserves the movie treatment, don't you think? This book follows young Daisy Fay, who's growing up with a cast of characterful neighbors on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the 1950s.

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Ann Patchett's Philadelphia-set novel earned lots of fans when it was published in 2019. A story about siblings tangled up in their family history, it has dramatic potential as well as the opportunity for exciting production design. (Wouldn't you love to see the eponymous Dutch house?)

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Katie Kitamura's new novel is a complex and thrilling story about an interpreter at The Hague dealing with heartbreak and incendiary global politics. Laced with compelling language and plenty of drama, it would make a fantastic jump to the big screen.

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Andrew Sean Greer's bighearted novel about an author traveling the globe to avoid the wedding of his former partner—and finding so many hiccups along the way—would make for an uproarious film, but it would tug at the heartstrings too.

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A young woman makes an important choice in this hard-to-put-down novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It leads to two Sliding Doors-style paths, two alternate realities of her life, which play out amid questions of fate, love, and free will.  

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There are whispers of a multi-episode adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's epic One Hundred Years of Solitude. Fingers are crossed that this sweeping story, first published in 1967, will make it to our screens sooner rather than later.

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From the author of Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow comes this sweeping road novel that's about self-discovery and starting over—and is peopled with an exciting cast of characters.

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Any of Jasmine Guillory's novels would make great movies—The Wedding Date, The Proposal, Royal Holiday—but Hollywood should start with this one, a story about a woman who joins her daughter on a work trip and finds more than she'd bargained for while she's abroad.

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There are also whispers of a 28 Summers movie in the works, which is good news, because this decades-spanning romance set along the coast in Nantucket is ripe for a Hollywood adaptation.

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