Every few years, someone at the office asks if we should compile a definitive list of our favorite book-to-screen adaptations. And every time, the conversation devolves into an argument that lasts the rest of the afternoon. Not because we disagree about what makes a good adaptation, but because we disagree about what an adaptation even owes to its source material. I love these arguments. They are the kind of thing that reminds me why I work with people who care about books.

So here is my personal list, which reflects my own tastes and biases and will probably annoy at least half the people reading this. I am not going to pretend this is objective. I have opinions about adaptations that border on religious conviction, and I am going to share them.

Before I get to specific titles, though, I want to lay out what I think separates a great adaptation from a merely competent one. A competent adaptation takes a book and translates it to the screen. The plot is preserved, the characters look and sound roughly as described, and the major scenes play out more or less as written. This is fine. It is respectful. It is also, in my experience, almost always disappointing, because the things that make a book great are usually not the things that translate most naturally to film or television.

A great adaptation does something different. It takes the essence of the book, the emotional and thematic core, and finds a cinematic way to express that essence. This might mean changing the plot, cutting characters, rearranging timelines, or inventing scenes that do not appear in the source material. These changes can feel like betrayals if you are attached to the book’s specific details. But if the changes serve the story’s deeper truth, the adaptation can achieve something remarkable: it can make you feel the way the book made you feel, using an entirely different set of tools.

With that framework in mind, let me start with what I consider the gold standard. The 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the one with Colin Firth. I know this is a conventional choice and I do not care. It is the best literary adaptation I have ever seen, and I will explain why.

The miniseries format gave the adapters (screenwriter Andrew Davies, director Simon Langton) something that films almost never get: time. Six episodes, roughly five hours of screen time. This is still shorter than reading the novel, but it is enough time to let scenes breathe, to develop secondary characters, and to preserve the rhythm of Austen’s narrative. Most film adaptations of novels feel rushed. This one does not. It has the leisurely pacing of a long afternoon in the countryside, which is appropriate because that is essentially what the story is about.

Davies made smart decisions about what to add and what to change. He invented scenes showing Darcy’s perspective that Austen, writing from Elizabeth’s point of view, did not include. These additions feel organic rather than intrusive because they serve the story’s central dynamic. We need to understand Darcy’s inner life to appreciate the arc of the romance, and Austen accomplishes this through narration and implication. Davies accomplishes it by showing us Darcy fencing, staring out windows, and, in the famous lake scene, taking an impulsive swim. These are visual tools doing the work of literary tools, and they do it brilliantly.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I want to talk about adaptations that I think fail in instructive ways. The 2012 film version of Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright, tried something ambitious. It set much of the action on a theatrical stage, with scenes transitioning through stagecraft rather than conventional editing. The concept was clever, drawing attention to the performative nature of aristocratic Russian society. But for me, the cleverness got in the way. I was constantly aware of the formal conceit, which kept me from getting lost in the story. The adaptation was more interested in being an adaptation than in being a story, and I think that is a common trap.

Let me talk about some adaptations that I think are underrated. The 2005 film Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The source material was Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote, but the film narrowed its focus to the period when Capote was writing In Cold Blood. This is a perfect example of an adaptation that improves on its source by being more focused. Clarke’s biography covers Capote’s entire life. The film zooms in on a few years and mines them for everything they are worth. Hoffman’s performance is astonishing, capturing Capote’s charm, vanity, intelligence, and moral corruption with a precision that text alone cannot achieve.

Another underrated adaptation: the 2010 Coen Brothers film True Grit. The Coens went back to Charles Portis’s novel rather than remaking the 1969 John Wayne film, and the result is truer to the book’s voice than most people realize. Portis wrote in a formal, slightly archaic style that gives the narrative a tone somewhere between adventure story and dark comedy. The Coens captured that tone perfectly. The dialogue in the film is lifted almost verbatim from the novel in many scenes, and it works because Portis’s prose is so distinctive that it sounds right even when spoken aloud. Hailee Steinfeld’s performance as Mattie Ross is one of the best depictions of a literary character I have ever seen on screen. She sounds exactly the way Mattie sounds in my head when I read the book.

I want to spend some time on television adaptations, because I think the golden age of prestige TV has been very good for literary adaptation. The extended runtime of a television series allows for the kind of depth and complexity that feature films usually cannot accommodate. A ten-hour miniseries can do justice to a long novel in a way that a two-hour film simply cannot.

The HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is a good example. Roth’s novel is dense, politically complex, and deeply rooted in a specific time and place (Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s). A film would have had to strip it down to its plot mechanics, losing the texture and nuance that make the novel powerful. The miniseries format preserved that texture. It had time for the dinner table conversations, the neighborhood dynamics, the slow accumulation of dread as the political situation worsens. It felt like the novel, which is the highest compliment I can pay to an adaptation.

On the other hand, I think some recent TV adaptations have gone too far in the other direction, padding out relatively slim source material to fill multiple seasons. When a 200-page novel is adapted into 30 hours of television, something has to fill those hours, and that something is usually invented subplots, expanded backstories for minor characters, and scenes that exist primarily to justify the episode count. This is not adaptation; it is inflation. I would rather watch a tight, focused adaptation that leaves me wanting more than a bloated one that makes me check how many episodes are left.

Let me mention a few more favorites quickly. The 1993 film of The Age of Innocence, directed by Martin Scorsese. Yes, that Martin Scorsese. People forget that the director of Goodfellas also made one of the most elegant period dramas in cinema history. Scorsese understood that Edith Wharton’s novel is essentially about the violence of social convention, and he filmed it with the same meticulous attention to detail and underlying tension that he brings to his crime films. The result is gorgeous and devastating.

The 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, adapted from Andre Aciman’s novel. Luca Guadagnino’s film does something that I think is very difficult: it captures the feeling of a first-person interior narrative without relying on voiceover. The novel is told entirely from Elio’s perspective, and much of its power comes from his internal monologue. The film replaces that monologue with Timothee Chalamet’s extraordinarily expressive face, the sun-drenched Italian setting, and Sufjan Stevens’s music. Different tools, same emotional destination.

And I have to mention the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, because it exemplifies my earlier point about great adaptations departing from their source material. Ken Kesey’s novel is narrated by Chief Bromden and is deeply concerned with his internal experience. The film shifts the focus to McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and tells the story from a more external perspective. Kesey hated this change and refused to watch the film. But I think the change was the right call for the medium. Cinema is better at showing us how characters affect each other than at showing us what is happening inside a single character’s head. By centering McMurphy’s disruptive energy and its effect on the ward, the film found a cinematic equivalent for the novel’s themes of institutional power and individual rebellion.

I realize I have been talking mostly about adaptations of literary classics and well-known novels. Let me shift to something closer to home. At ScrollWorks, we occasionally get inquiries from film and television producers interested in adapting our titles. These conversations are always exciting and almost always go nowhere, which is the standard experience for small publishers dealing with Hollywood. But they have given me some insight into how adaptation decisions get made on the other side.

What I have learned is that producers are rarely looking for the same things that readers love about a book. A reader might love a novel for its prose style, its psychological depth, or its thematic complexity. A producer is looking for a compelling protagonist, a clear narrative arc, visual potential, and ideally some built-in audience awareness. These criteria overlap sometimes, but not always. A beautifully written novel with an ambiguous ending and an unreliable narrator might be a masterpiece on the page and a nightmare to adapt.

This is why I think the most interesting adaptations often come from imperfect source material. A novel that is a little bit flawed, that has a great premise but uneven execution, can actually be a better candidate for adaptation than a perfect novel. The adapter has room to work. They can fix the structural problems while preserving the premise, which is often the thing that attracted them in the first place. A perfect novel, by contrast, presents the adapter with a dilemma: any change might make it worse, but a slavishly faithful adaptation might not work as cinema.

There is one more category of adaptation I want to mention, which is the adaptation that transcends its source material entirely. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is based on a Mario Puzo novel that is, honestly, not a great book. It is entertaining pulp fiction with some memorable characters, but the prose is flat and the structure is ungainly. The film took the raw materials of the novel, the characters, the setting, the central family drama, and elevated them into something that operates on a completely different artistic level. The novel is a good beach read. The film is one of the greatest works of American cinema. That gap between source and adaptation is enormous, and it is a reminder that adaptation is itself a creative act, not just a translation exercise. I will end with a thought about why literary adaptations matter to us as a publisher. Every time a book is adapted for screen, it brings new readers to the source material. Some of those readers discover the author’s other work. Some of them discover the publisher and explore our catalog. The adaptation ecosystem, messy and imperfect as it is, is one of the most powerful reader-discovery mechanisms in existence. When someone watches a film they love and then picks up the novel, they are doing something wonderful: they are discovering that the story has more depth than any single telling can capture. They are learning that a book is not just a story; it is an experience that no other medium can fully replicate.

That is why we will keep acquiring titles with strong narrative voices, complex characters, and stories that resonate emotionally. Titles like The Last Archive and Echoes of Iron are the kinds of books I dream about seeing adapted someday. Whether that happens or not, they are doing what books do best: telling stories that stay with you long after the last page. And if Hollywood comes calling, we will be ready to have that conversation.