Books to Read Before They Become Movies
We love a good film.
But—when it comes to storytelling—books rule.
By Mark Athitakis
10 of 10
The Light Between Oceans
By M.L. Stedman
345 pages;
Scribner
The heart-stopping vistas of the coast of Western Australia
provide the backdrop for the baby drama at the center of
The Light Between Oceans, out September 2 (Alicia Vikander) and Tom (Michael
Fassbender) play a childless couple who discovers an infant in a rowboat that's
washed ashore. Director Derek Cianfrance's adaptation highlights the painful
tension between the couple and woman (Rachel Weisz) who arrives to claim the
adopted child, but Stedman's best-seller triumphs both as a war novel and as a domestic drama, delivering an
unflinching portrait of Tom's PTSD, as he tries to shake his memories of World
War I and the battlefields filled with "men whose legs trailed by a hank
of sinews, or whose guts cascaded from their casing like slithering eels."
— Mark Athitakis
Published 05/23/2016