Staff Picks: Our All-Time Favorite Book-to-Screen Adaptations

This Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller is “a captivating story of love lost and found” (Kirkus Reviews) set in the lush Sicilian countryside, where one woman discovers the healing powers of food, family, and unexpected grace in her darkest hours.

It was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro’s traditional Sicilian family did not approve of his marrying a black American woman. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forged on. They built a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships, and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopted at birth. Eventually, they reconciled with Saro’s family just as he faced a formidable cancer that would consume all their dreams.

From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro’s family, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother-in-law’s table. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward. All along the way she reflects on her and Saro’s romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages.

In Sicily, it is said that every story begins with a marriage or a death—in Tembi Locke’s case, it is both. “Locke’s raw and heartfelt memoir will uplift readers suffering from the loss of their own loved ones” (Publishers Weekly), but her story is also about love, finding a home, and chasing flavor as an act of remembrance. From Scratch is for anyone who has dared to reach for big love, fought for what mattered most, and those who needed a powerful reminder that life is...delicious.

Dangerous obsession and greed meet in this wickedly funny modern classic, which follows an eccentric plant dealer as he attempts to poach the endangered ghost orchid from a Florida preserve and clone it for profit. This true crime book is actually a charming, passionate underdog story.

In 1967, Susanna Kaysen spent almost two years in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods. With vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers, Kaysen's searing memoir gives us an up-close view of mental illness and the road to recovery.

Now a Netflix film starring Justin Hartley!

In this holiday-themed novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Mistletoe Promise and The Walk, a man receives the best Christmas present he could ask for: the chance to rewrite the past.

Bestselling romance author Jacob Churcher hasn't been home for almost twenty years—not since his mentally ill mother kicked him out of the house when he was just sixteen. When a lawyer calls, days before Christmas, to inform him that his estranged mother has passed away and left her house to him, Jacob returns not just to settle the estate but to try and reconcile with the past and the pain and abuse he experienced as a child. Also, maybe cleaning out her house will be slightly less depressing than spending the holidays alone, watching re-runs of Christmas classics.

But as it turns out, the house holds more than just difficult memories, Jacob’s mother had become a hoarder and he must excavate through two decades worth of clutter. As Jacob digs through the detritus, like an archaeologist, he uncovers many puzzling items including a diary left by someone named Noel, a young woman he has no recollection of, who stayed with Jacob’s family during her pregnancy. That’s not the only echo from the past. Jacob has an unexpected visitor, Rachel, a woman looking for the mother who put her up for adoption thirty years before. United by their quest to make sense of the past and rewrite their futures, Jacob and Rachel begin a search for Noel. Along the way they find more than they possibly imagined, including grace, forgiveness and a chance at love.

The stunning, full-color, behind-the-scenes look at Shondaland’s hit series on Netflix.

Inside Bridgerton is the intimate behind-the-scenes story of the hit Shondaland series on Netflix. Shondaland executive producers Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers offer exclusive insights, and introduce you to the series writers, producers, directors, cast, crew, and talented creatives who brought Julia Quinn’s beloved novels to the screen. Full-color and beautifully designed, Inside Bridgerton is the official book about the show, and includes never-before-seen photographs, firsthand accounts on casting, insight into the decisions behind the costumes and sets, directors’ accounts on filming your favorite scenes, and more from the creative minds that launched a cultural phenomenon.

From the Introduction to Inside Bridgerton:
SHONDA: Shall we take everyone back to the beginning? Not to the 1800s, but to 2017 and that hotel room where I was sick, and needed something to read, and there happened to be a copy of The Duke & I by Julia Quinn, the first of the Bridgerton novels. I’m not someone who was into romance novels—I really didn’t even know much about the genre. But I picked it up, couldn’t put it down, and then immediately got my hands on the rest of them because they were a fabulous read. And then I passed them to you.
BETSY: I thought you were high. Or that you had hit your head in that hotel room while you had the flu. Romance novels? But you insisted that they would be a fabulous show and you have excellent taste. I was deeply skeptical because I hadn’t read a romance novel since I was a teen—I’d certainly never read a period romance novel.
SHONDA: Totally—you read the ones of the 1980s, when everyone wore huge shoulder pads and diamonds.
BETSY: Right. So there’s some continuity here because these guys were wearing diamonds, too.
SHONDA: Fair—but as far as a period romance, I mean, if it wasn’t Jane Austen, I didn’t really know about it. I’m not going to diss Jane Austen because I’m not an idiot…
BETSY: She might get upset.
SHONDA: She might roll over in her grave. But Julia Quinn’s novels were just so much juicier than Austen, and they’re written by someone who was far less confined and less proper. After all, Julia is a modern woman, not stuck in the constraints of the age.
BETSY: Without a doubt. And I never knew that the ton existed: Austen wrote about a pastoral society where everyone is in relatively drab clothes and spent a lot of time in chapels and churches.
SHONDA: Totally. And they recycled their dresses more.
BETSY: Meanwhile, this was an amazing world of luxury and excess. And she had this crazy device of a gossip columnist, pulling the strings, which was such a cool concept. Julia Quinn created an entirely new, glamorous, bright world that you had actually never seen before.

Soon to be a streaming series in Summer 2022!

Belly has an unforgettable summer in this stunning start to the Summer I Turned Pretty series from the New York Times bestselling author of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Jenny Han.

Some summers are just destined to be pretty.

Belly measures her life in summers. Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer, a place away from the beach house, away from Susannah, and most importantly, away from Jeremiah and Conrad. They are the boys that Belly has known since her very first summer—they have been her brother figures, her crushes, and everything in between. But one summer, one wonderful and terrible summer, the more everything changes, the more it all ends up just the way it should have been all along.

With influences ranging from The Chronicles of Narnia to Harry Potter to A Game of Thrones, Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy is an enthralling, diabolically crafted coming-of-age tale about magic practiced in the real world—where good and evil aren’t black and white and power comes at a terrible price. Dig into this series now before the Syfy adaptation hits the small screen next year.

Now an original Netflix series!

From the author of The Wicked Heart and The Immortal comes a beautiful and haunting novel about a group of five terminally ill teenagers whose midnight stories become their reality.

Rotterham Home was a hospice for young people—a place where teenagers with terminal illnesses went to die. Nobody who checked in ever checked out. It was a place of pain and sorrow, but also, remarkably, a place of humor and adventure.

Every night at twelve, a group of young guys and girls at the hospice came together to tell stories. They called themselves the Midnight Club, and their stories could be true or false, inspiring or depressing, or somewhere in-between.

One night, in the middle of a particularly scary story, the teenagers make a secret pact with each other, which says, “The first one who dies will do whatever he or she can do to contact us from beyond the grave, to give us proof that there is life after death.”

Then one of them does die...