Books Made into Oscar-Nominated Films

Before they were nominated for Academy Awards, these stories were books. Which do you prefer, the book or the movie?

Updated March 17, 2025
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Twelve years a slave
Northup, Solomon
Paper Book
The official movie tie-in edition to the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong'o, and directed by Steve McQueen   New York Times bestseller "I could not believe that I...

306.362 N819 2013

A long way home
Brierley, Saroo.
Paper Book
First it was a media sensation. Then it became the New York Times bestseller and #1 international bestseller A Long Way Home. Now it's Lion, the major motion picture starring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, and Rooney Mara--nominated for six Academy Awards! This is the...

362.734 B766 2014

Nomadland : surviving America in the twenty-first century
Bruder, Jessica
Paper Book
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on...

331.398 Bruder 2017

Capote : a biography
Clarke, Gerald
Paper Book
From instant celebrity at age 23 to overweight, alcoholic loner in his 50s, Truman Capote streaked across the middle of this century on a comet of genius, self-destruction, and fame. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews with Capote and with nearly everyone who knew him, and with exclusive...

813.54 C17yc

Black Panther. Book 1A nation under our feet
Coates, Ta-Nehisi
Paper Book
MacArthur Genius and National Book Award-winner T- Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) takes the helm, confronting T'Challa with a dramatic upheaval in Wakanda. When a superhuman terrorist group that calls itself The People sparks a violent uprising, the land famed for its incredible technology...
The collected stories of Colette
Colette
Paper Book
Edited and with an introduction by Robert PhelpsThe hundred short stories collected here include such masterpieces as 'Bella-Vista', 'The Tender Shoot' and 'Le K-pi', Colette's subtle and ruthless rendering of a woman's belated sexual awakening. Shot through with the colours and flavours of the...
Room
Donoghue, Emma
Paper Book
Now a major Oscar-winning film starring Brie Larson Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don't have the key. Jack and Ma are prisoners. Room...
Erasure
Everett, Percival
Paper Book
Introduced by Brandon Taylor - Booker-shortlisted author of Real Life - Erasure is an unforgettable, satirical but tender novel about race and cultural expectations in contemporary America.
The Curious case of Benjamin Button : story to screenplay
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paper Book
From one of the great voices in the history of American literature, a witty and fantastical satire about aging, and the inspiration for the 2008 blockbuster film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known today for his novels, but during his...
Extremely loud & incredibly close
Foer, Jonathan Safran
Paper Book
ANew York Times Bestseller * NamedA Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,andRocky Mountain News   Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an...
Underwater wild : my octopus teacher's extraordinary world
Foster, Craig (Filmmaker)
Paper Book
An immersive journey into the underwater world that holds transformative lessons for us all Craig Foster and Ross Frylinck regularly dive together in the awe-inspiring kelp forests off South Africa, without wetsuits or oxygen tanks. Craig had dived this way for years, including...

577.78 Foster 2021

Killers of the Flower Moon : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI
Grann, David
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, "one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."--New York...

970.3 Osage Grann 2017

Travelling to infinity : my life with Stephen
Hawking, Jane
Paper Book
Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous and remarkable scientists of our age and the author of the scientific bestseller A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 25 million copies. In this compelling memoir, his first wife, Jane Hawking, relates the inside story of their...

530.092 H313yh 2014

Seabiscuit : an American legend
Hillenbrand, Laura.
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken comes a universal underdog story about the horse who came out of nowhere to become a legend. "Fascinating . . . Vivid . . . A first-rate piece of storytelling, leaving us not only...

798.4 H557 2003

Alan Turing : the enigma : the book that inspired the film The Imitation Game
Hodges, Andrew.
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912...

510.92 T846yh 2014

Les misérables
Hugo, Victor
Paper Book
Now a major musical film from Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway, and also featuring Amanda Seyfreid, Helena Bonham-Carter and Sacha Baron-Cohen, Victor Hugo's Les Miserablesis one of the great works of western...
Hidden figures : the American dream and the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race
Lee Shetterly, Margot.
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times bestseller -WINNER OF ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD FOR NONFICTION -WINNER BLACK CAUCUS OF AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION BEST NONFICTION BOOK -WINNER NAACP IMAGE AWARD BEST NONFICTION BOOK -WINNER NATIONAL ACADEMIES OF SCIENCES,...

510.92 L516 2016

The big short : inside the doomsday machine
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine, and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and...

330.973 L587

The blind side : evolution of a game
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday,...
Moneyball : the art of winning an unfair game
Lewis, Michael
Paper Book
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball...

796.357 Lewis 2003

The King's speech
Logue, Mark.
Paper Book
It's the eve of World War II, and King Edward VIII has abdicated the throne of England to marry the woman he loves. Never has the nation needed a leader more. But the new monarch, George VI--father of today's Queen Elizabeth II--is painfully shy and cursed with a terrible stammer. How can he inspire...

941.084 L829yL 2010

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the west : a novel
Maguire, Gregory.
Paper Book
This is the book that started it all! The basis for the smash hit Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire's breathtaking New York Times bestseller Wicked views the land of Oz, its inhabitants, its Wizard, and the Emerald City, through a darker and greener (not rosier) lens....
Life of Pi : a novel
Martel, Yann.
Paper Book
NOW ON BROADWAY The international bestseller and modern classic of adventure, survival, and the power of storytelling is now an award-winning play.  After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the...
Atonement : a novel
McEwan, Ian
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author. ...
War horse
Morpurgo, Michael
Paper Book
Before the Steven Spielberg film, before the National Theatre production, there was the classic children's novel... In the deadly chaos of the First World War, one horse witnesses the reality of battle from both sides of the trenches. Bombarded by artillery, with bullets knocking riders...
A beautiful mind : a biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, 1994
Nasar, Sylvia.
Paper Book
In this dramatic and moving biography, Sylvia Nasar re-creates the life of a mathematical genius whose brilliant career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize. "A Beautiful Mind" traces...
Desolation Island
O'Brian, Patrick
Paper Book
Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon Stephen Maturin sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spy--and a treacherous disease that decimates the crew. With a Dutch man-of-war to...
True grit
Portis, Charles.
Paper Book
A #1 New York Times bestseller, Charles Portis's True Grit is "an epic and a legend" (Washington Post), a story of danger and adventure in the Old West--the basis for two award-winning films, the first starring John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning role, as...
The revenant : a novel of revenge
Punke, Michael
Paper Book
A #1 New York Times BestsellerThe book that inspired the Oscar-winning filmA thrilling tale of betrayal and revenge set against the nineteenth-century American frontier, this is the astonishing story of real-life trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass -- a remarkable tale of obsession, the human will...
The silver linings playbook
Quick, Matthew
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller, The Silver Linings Playbook was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. It tells the riotous and poignant story of how one man regains his memory and comes to terms with the magnitude of his wife's betrayal....
All quiet on the western front
Remarque, Erich Maria
Paper Book
The original US edition of the masterpiece of war literature depicting the plight of German soldiers during World War I--now an Oscar-nominated Netflix film   From the perspective of Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier in World War I, comes an unsettling tale of...
Push : a novel
Sapphire
Paper Book
An electrifying first novel that shocks by its language, its circumstances, and its brutal honesty, Push recounts a young black street-girl's horrendous and redemptive journey through a Harlem inferno. For Precious Jones, 16 and pregnant with her father's child, miraculous hope appears and the world...
The reader
Schlink, Bernhard.
Paper Book
Already an acclaimed & best-selling work of fiction in Europe (currently being translated into fourteen different languages worldwide), The Reader is both a literary surprise & a moral challenge: a riveting, provocative, & deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening in a passionate,...
Black Klansman : race, hate, and the undercover investigation of a lifetime
Stallworth, Ron
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times Bestseller! The extraordinary true story and basis for the Academy Award winning film BlacKkKlansman, written and directed by Spike Lee, produced by Jordan Peele, and starring John David Washington and Adam Driver. When detective...

322.42 Stallworth 2018

The help
Stockett, Kathryn
Paper Book
A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club -- Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. Aibileen is a wise, regal black maid raising her seventeenth white child. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, can cook like nobody's business but can't mind her tongue. It...
Women talking : a novel
Toews, Miriam
Paper Book
The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER "This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life...
The fellowship of the ring
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Paper Book
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien's three-volume epic, is set in the imaginary world of Middle-earth - home to many strange beings, and most notably hobbits, a peace-loving "little people," cheerful and shy. Since its original British publication in 1954-55, the saga has entranced readers...
The return of the king : being the third part of The lord of the rings
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Paper Book
The standard harcover edition of the concluding volume of The Lord of the Rings includes a large format fold-out map and extensive appendices. As the Shadow of Mordor grows across the land, the Companions of the Ring have become involved in separate adventures. Aragorn, revealed as the hidden...
The two towers : being the second part of The lord of the rings
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Paper Book
The standard hardcover edition of the second volume of The Lord of the Rings includes a large format fold-out map. Frodo and his Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the...
Million dollar baby
Toole, F. X.
Paper Book
'Ring magic is different from the magic of the theatre, because the curtain never comes down - because the blood in the ring is real blood, and the broken noses and the broken hearts are real, and sometimes they are broken forever. Boxing is the magic of men in combat, the magic of will, and skill,...
Brooklyn : a novel
Tóibín, Colm
Paper Book
Colm Tóibín's New York Times bestselling novel--now an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture--is "a moving, deeply satisfying read" (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the...
The nickel boys : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. * "One of the most gifted novelists in...
Winter's bone : a novel
Woodrell, Daniel.
Paper Book
Daniel Woodrell's modern classic is an unforgettable tale of desperation and courage that inspired the award-winning film starring Jennifer Lawrence.  Ree Dolly's father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose...

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