Take a read of these ten books before the films are released this year and let us know which version you preferred!
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011 Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.
2. My cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier
Orphaned at an early age, Philip Ashley is raised by his benevolent cousin, Ambrose. Resolutely single, Ambrose delights in making Philip his heir, knowing he will treasure his beautiful Cornish estate. But Philip’s world is shattered when Ambrose sets off on a trip to Florence. There he falls in love and marries – and then dies suddenly in suspicious circumstances. Before long, the new widow – Philip’s cousin Rachel – arrives in England. Despite himself, Philip is drawn to this beautiful, mysterious woman. But could she have masterminded Ambrose’s death?
3. The dark tower, Stephen King
The final volume in this seven book series sees gunslinger Roland on a roller-coaster mix of exhilarating triumph and aching loss in his unrelenting quest to reach the dark tower. Roland’s band of pilgrims remains united, though scattered. Susannah-Mia has been carried off to New York to give birth, Terrified of what may happen, Jake, Father Callahan and Oy follow. Roland and Eddie are in Maine, looking for the site which will lead them to Susannah. As he finally closes in on the tower, Roland’s every step is shadowed by a terrible and sinister creation. And finally, he realises, he may have to walk the last dark strait alone…
4. Before I fall, Lauren Oliver
They say that when you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happened for me’ Sam Kingston is dead. Except she isn’t. On a rainy February night, eighteen-year-old Sam is killed in a horrific car crash. But then the impossible happens: she wakes up in her own bed, on the morning of the day that she died. Forced to live over and over the last day of her life – the drive to school, skipping class, the fateful party – she desperately struggles to alter the outcome, but every morning she wakes up on the day of the crash.
Mackenzie Allen Philips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.
6. The zookeeper’s wife, Diane Ackerman
When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw and the city’s zoo along with it. This text recreates the life of the ‘zookeeper’s wife’, describing how she kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants.
7. Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train was surprisingly full for the time of year/ But by the morning there was one passenger fewer. An American lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. With tension mounting, detective Hercule Poirot comes up with not one, but two solutions to the crime.
8. The lost city of Z, David Grann
Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was the last of a breed of great British explorers who ventured into ‘blank spots’ on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and unwavering sense of purpose. In 1925, one of the few remaining blank spots in the world was in the Amazon. Fawcett believed the impenetrable jungle held a secret to a large, complex civilization like El Dorado, which he christened the ‘City of Z’. When he and his son set out to find it, hoping to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history, they warned that none should follow them in the event that they did not return. They vanished without a trace. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers — shocked that a man many deemed invincible could disappear in a land he knew better than anyone, and drawn by the centuries-old myth of El Dorado — searched for the expedition and the city. Many died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows. Others simply vanished.
When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users’ personal emails, social media, and finances with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of transparency. Mae can’t believe her great fortune to work for them – even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public …
An evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet for dinner.They need to discuss their teenage sons.The boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on CCTV.They remain unidentified – except by their parents.How far will each couple go to protect their child?
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