Book-to-screen adaptations we’d love to see

Now a hit HBO Max TV series starring Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe & Rachel Keller

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, here is a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

At the age of nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquillity. What he got was a life of crime … crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shimbun. For twelve years of eighty-hour work weeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop brought him face to face with Japan’s most infamous yakuza boss — and with the threat of death for him and his family — Adelstein decided to step down … momentarily. Then, he fought back.

In Tokyo Vice, Adelstein tells the riveting, often humorous tale of his transformation from an inexperienced cub reporter to a daring investigative journalist with a price on his head. With its vivid, visceral descriptions of crime in Japan and candid exploration of the world of modern-day yakuza that even few Japanese ever see, Tokyo Vice is a fascination, and an education, from first to last.

An essential exploration of women’s sexuality that will radically transform your sex life into one filled with confidence and joy.

After all the books that have been written about sex, all the blogs and TV shows and radio Q&As, how can it be that we all still have so many questions? The frustrating reality is that we’ve been lied to — not deliberately, it’s no one’s fault, but still. We were told the wrong story.

Come as You Are reveals the true story behind female sexuality, uncovering the little-known science of what makes us tick and, more importantly, how and why. Sex educator Dr Emily Nagoski debunks the common sexual myths that are making women (and some men!) feel inadequate between the sheets.

Underlying almost all of the questions we still have about sex is the common worry: ‘Am I normal?’ This book answers with a resounding Yes! We are all different, but we are all normal — and once we learn this, we can create for ourselves better sex and more profound pleasure than we ever thought possible.

From age eighteen on, I had a partner, a kindred spirit. I had a friend. Someone bound and determined to keep me from the worst in myself.

At a private East Coast college, two young women meet in art class. Sharon, ambitious but lacking confidence, arrives from rural Kentucky. Mel, brash and wildly gifted, brings her own brand of hellfire from the backwaters of Florida. Both outsiders, Sharon and Mel become fervent friends, bonding over their love of classic cartoons, their dysfunctional working-class families, and — above all — their craft: drawing. Mel, to understand her tumultuous past, and Sharon, to lose herself altogether.

A decade later, Sharon and Mel are an award-winning animation duo, living and working in Brooklyn, and poised on the edge of even greater success after the release of their first full-length feature. But with this success comes self-doubt, and cracks in their relationship start to form. When unexpected tragedy strikes, long-buried resentments rise to the surface, hastening a reckoning no one sees coming.

Funny and heartbreaking by turn, The Animators is a dazzling story of female friendship, the cost of a creative life, and the secrets that can undo us.

Could you marry a man you’ve never met? Three Korean women in 1918 make a life-changing journey to Hawaii, where they will marry, having seen only photographs of their intended husbands.

Different fates await each of these women. Hongju, who dreams of a marriage of ‘natural love’, meets a man who looks twenty years older than his photograph; Songhwa, who wants to escape from her life of ridicule as the granddaughter of a shaman, meets a lazy drunkard. And then there’s Willow, whose 26-year-old groom, Taewan, looks just like his image …

Real life doesn’t always resemble a picture, but there’s no going back. And while things don’t turn out quite as they’d hoped, even for Willow, they do find something that makes their journey worthwhile — each other.