Is your new year's resolution to read more? Or do you want to push yourself to broaden your reading and try some new genres and authors? Take on the challenge and read 25 books in 2025!
Our Reading(s) challenge bingo card has 25 different prompts to inspire your reading this year. Download the bingo card here or pick up a printed copy in our shops.
And to help you further, we'll be posting blogs full of books relating to the prompts. This week we have a great list of new and classic books that have have been adapted for the screen. So if you've seen a trailer that's piqued your interest, try picking up the book first, and mark off a bingo square!
You can also find recommendations for the 'One-word title' prompt on our blog here and 'An animal on the cover' here.
Prompt: Adapted into a show or movie
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
An exquisite winter tale of courage and its cost, set in Catholic Ireland.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration.
A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.
Wicked
Gregory Maguire
Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin – no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz's most promising young citizens.
But Elphaba's Oz is no utopia. The Wizard's secret police are everywhere. Animals – those creatures with voices, souls, and minds – are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals – even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas.
The Perfect Couple
Elin Hilderbrand
Every couple has their secrets …
It's wedding season, and tensions are brewing.
When one lavish wedding ends in disaster before it can even begin – with the maid of honour discovered dead in Nantucket Harbor just hours before the ceremony – everyone in the wedding party is suddenly a suspect.
As Chief of Police Ed Kapenash digs into the best man, the bride, the groom's famous mystery novelist mother, and even a member of his own family, the chief discovers that every wedding is a minefield – and that no couple is perfect.
Nightbitch
Rachel Yoder
One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else …
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.
Instead, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice …
With its clear eyes on contemporary womanhood and sharp take on structures of power, Nightbitch is an outrageously original, joyfully subversive read that will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition.
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.
In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.
The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.
The Friend
Sigrid Nunez
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.
Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unravelling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.
Queenie
Candice Carty-Williams
Queenie Jenkins can’t cut a break. Well, apart from one from her long term boyfriend, Tom. That’s definitely just a break though. Definitely not a break up. Stuck between a boss who doesn’t seem to see her, a family who don’t seem to listen (if it’s not Jesus or water rates, they’re not interested), and trying to fit in two worlds that don’t really understand her, it’s no wonder she’s struggling.
She was named to be queen of everything.
So why is she finding it so hard to rule her own life?
Conclave
Robert Harris
Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, 118 cardinals are meeting in conclave to cast their votes in the world's most secretive election.
They are holy men. But they are ambitious. And they have rivals. Over the next 72 hours, one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth. Who will it be?
The Road Trip
Beth O'Leary
Addie and her sister are on an epic road trip to a friend’s wedding in rural Scotland. But, not long after setting off, a car slams into theirs. The driver is none other than Addie’s ex, who she hasn’t seen since their traumatic break-up two years earlier.
Dylan and his best mate are heading to the wedding too, so Addie has no choice but to offer them a ride. And with four hundred miles to go, they can’t avoid confronting the very messy history of their relationship …
Will they make it to the wedding? And, more importantly, is this really the end of the road for Addie and Dylan?
