William Golding’s 1954 novel has been adapted for film twice — Peter Brook’s bleak 1963 version and Harry Hook’s muddled 1990 American take — and neither has held up as a definitive interpretation. Jack Thorne, who wrote Adolescence, now has a four-episode BBC series that landed on Netflix in the US on May 4, and critics are calling it the adaptation that may make all subsequent attempts unnecessary. The Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 91%.

Adapting One Hundred Years of Solitude was considered impossible for most of the decades since Gabriel García Márquez published it in 1967. The novel’s narrative structure — seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, with magical realism woven into the historical fabric so completely that separating them is not a meaningful operation — resists the conventions of visual storytelling in fundamental ways. The García Márquez estate spent decades refusing film rights.

Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures spent an extended period on bestseller lists largely through word of mouth — the kind of book readers press on other readers with an insistence that can be off-putting until you actually read it. The premise involves a widow working at an aquarium who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus named Marcellus. It is also a missing-persons mystery and a story about grief and the ways humans project emotional intelligence onto creatures who may or may not share it.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the first Hunger Games prequel, had the difficult task of making audiences care about a young Coriolanus Snow — the series’ established villain — without either redeeming him or making the film’s emotional investment incoherent. It largely succeeded, though it polarized readers of Suzanne Collins’s novel who felt the adaptation simplified the political argument the book was making. Sunrise on the Reaping, releasing November 2026, follows Haymitch Abernathy at sixteen during the 50th Hunger Games — the Second Quarter Quell, which is mentioned briefly in the original trilogy as the Games where twice the usual number of tributes were sent.

HBO’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights is being described, without apparent embarrassment, as the version that leans into what the novel was actually doing. Brontë’s 1847 text has always been more violent and erotic and structurally strange than its reputation as a tragic romance suggests — the relationship at its center is obsessive and destructive and explicitly includes class warfare, generational revenge, and a ghost. The sanitized versions have historically missed the point.