Fall Books to Read Before the Movies Come Out

Freedom is almost as terrifying as captivity in this story of a mother and son who've been locked away in a shed for years by an abusive man. Emma Donoghue adapted her own 2010 novel, which bodes well for the film (debuting October 16). But the reason to read the book first is the character of 5-year-old Jack, who escapes the shed only to surface in an everyday world that feels, to him, like a bizarre foreign planet. In the novel, that strangeness is embedded in the prose: His quirky sense of language and confusion about the simplest descriptions of reality (he's not quite sure what a pasture is, for instance) make his ordeal all the more heartbreaking—and unforgettable.