When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Read the books before catching their screen adaptations starring actors like Dakota Johnson, Florence Pugh, Ana de Armas, and more.
Amazon; Rachel Mendelson/Insider
Every year, beloved books and series get turned into movies and TV shows.
Below are 21 popular books that will be released as a movie or TV series in 2022.
Need more reading suggestions? Here are 19 new books to read in 2022, based on your favorite TV show
Part of the joy of digging into a great new book is knowing that you’ll be rewarded with hours of enjoyment. If it’s one of the increasingly numerous books adapted for the big screen or a series (possibly with a stacked cast à la “Big Little Lies“), you can double the fun by reading them first.
Below, you’ll find 21 well-loved books slated to be released as a show or movie in 2022 (and some recent releseases), plus where to find them. Big premieres run the genre gamut, from new works in the “The Lord of the Rings” and “A Game of Thrones” universes to Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends.”
While book adaptations can help launch lesser-known actors’ careers, you might see some of your favorite big names this year: “Daisy Edgar-Jones in “Where The Crawdads Sing,” Dakota and Elle Fanning in “The Nightingale,” Florence Pugh in “The Wonder,” Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde,” and more.
21 books to read before they become movies or TV shows in 2022:
Descriptions provided by Amazon and edited for length and clarity.
Amazon
Format: Series (Apple TV+), starring Lee Min-Ho, Jin Ha, Jung Eun-chae, Youn Yuh-jung, and more
Release date: March 25, 2022
“There could only be a few winners — and a lot of losers. And yet, we played on because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant — and that her lover is married — she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations
Richly told and profoundly moving, “Pachinko” is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters — strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis — survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
Amazon
Format: Series (Netflix), starring Sienna Miller, Rupert Friend, Michelle Dockery, and more
Release date: April 15, 2022
Some people’s secrets are darker than others.
Sophie Whitehouse has a lovely home, two adorable children, and a handsome, successful husband. In other words, she has the “perfect” life. But everything changes the night her husband James comes home and confesses an indiscretion. Suddenly, her neat, ordered world is turned upside down. Did she ever really know the man she married?
And, as it turns out, James’s revelation is just the tip of the iceberg. He stands accused of a terrible crime. But, the truth is even more shocking than anyone ever could have thought. Is James the guilty perpetrator or an innocent victim of a toxic agenda?
Amazon
Format: Series (Netflix), starring Kit Connor, Joe Locke, Yasmin Finney, and more
Release date: April 22, 2022
Charlie and Nick are at the same school, but they’ve never met… until one day when they’re made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn’t think he has a chance.
But, love works in surprising ways, and Nick is more interested in Charlie than either of them realized.
Amazon
Format: Series (Apple TV+), starring Elisabeth Moss, Wagner Moura, Phillipa Soo, Chris Chalk, and more
Release date: April 29, 2022
Harper Curtis is a killer who stepped out of the past. Kirby Mazrachi is the girl who was never meant to have a future. Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women, burning with potential, whose lives Harper is destined to snuff out after he stumbles on a House in Depression-era Chicago that opens onto other times.
At the urging of the House, Harper inserts himself into the lives of these shining girls, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He’s the ultimate hunter, vanishing without a trace into another time after each murder — until one of his victims survives.
Determined to bring her would-be killer to justice, Kirby joins the Chicago Sun-Times to work with the reporter, Dan Velasquez, who covered her case. Soon Kirby finds herself closing in on an impossible truth…
Amazon
Format: Series (BBC, Hulu), starring Joe Alwyn, Jemima Kirke, Sasha Lane, Alison Oliver, and more
Release date: May 15, 2022
Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa’s world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick.
However amusing and ironic Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy, and Frances’ friendship with Bobbi begins to fracture. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally, terribly, with Bobbi.
Amazon
Format: Series (HBO), starring Rose Leslie, Theo James, Kate Siegel, and more
Release date: May 15, 2022
A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate.
Amazon
Format: Series (Amazon), starring Lola Tung, Jackie Chung, Rachel Blanchard, Christopher Briney, and more
Release date: June 17, 2022
Some summers are just destined to be pretty.
Belly measures her life in summers. Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer, a place away from the beach house, away from Susannah, and most importantly, away from Jeremiah and Conrad. They’re the boys that Belly has known since her very first summer— they have been her brother figures, her crushes, and everything in between. But one summer — one wonderful and terrible summer — the more everything changes, the more it all ends up just the way it should have been all along.
Amazon
Format: Movie, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, and more
Release date: July 15, 2022
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life — until the unthinkable happens.
Amazon
Format: Movie (Netflix), starring Cosmo Jarvis, Dakota Johnson, Henry Golding, and more
Release date: July 15, 2022
Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” concerns Anne Elliot, a young Englishwoman of 27 years, whose family moves to lower their expenses and reduce their debt by renting their home to an Admiral and his wife. The wife’s brother, Navy Captain Frederick Wentworth, was engaged to Anne in 1806, but the engagement was broken when Anne was “persuaded” by her friends and family to end their relationship.
Anne and Captain Wentworth, both single and unattached, meet again after a seven-year separation, setting the scene for many humorous encounters as well as a second, well-considered chance at love and marriage for Anne in her second “bloom.”
Amazon
Format: Movie, starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Hiroyuki Sanada, and more
Release date: August 5, 2022
Satoshi — The Prince — looks like an innocent schoolboy but is really a stylish and devious assassin. Risk fuels him, as does a good philosophical debate, such as questioning: Is killing really wrong? Kimura’s young son is in a coma thanks to The Prince, and Kimura has tracked him onto a bullet train heading from Tokyo to Morioka to exact his revenge. But Kimura soon discovers that they are not the only dangerous passengers on board.
Nanao, also nicknamed Ladybug, the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world,” is put on the bullet train by his boss, a mysterious young woman called Maria, to steal a suitcase full of money and get off at the first stop. The lethal duo of Tangerine and Lemon are also traveling to Morioka, and the suitcase leads others to show their hands. Why are they all on the same train, and who will make it off alive?
Amazon
Format: Series (HBO), starring Paddy Considine, Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy, Matt Smith, and more
Release date: August 21, 2022
Centuries before the events of “A Game of Thrones,” House Targaryen — the only family of dragonlords to survive the Doom of Valyria — took up residence on Dragonstone. “Fire & Blood” begins their tale with the legendary Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and goes on to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold that iconic seat, all the way up to the civil war that nearly tore their dynasty apart.
Amazon
Format: Series (Amazon), starring Robert Aramayo, Morfydd Clark, Markella Kavenagh, and more
Release date: September 2, 2022
“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, peace-loving “little people,” cheerful and shy. Since its original British publication in 1954-55, the saga has entranced readers of all ages. It is at once a classic myth and a modern fairytale.
Amazon
Format: Movie, starring Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, William Sadler, and more
Release date: September 9, 2022
Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem’s Lot in hopes that exploring the history of the Marsten House, an old mansion long the subject of rumor and speculation, will help him cast out his personal devils and provide inspiration for his new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods, and only one returns alive, Mears begins to realize that something sinister is at work.
In fact, his hometown is under siege from forces of darkness far beyond his imagination. And only he, with a small group of allies, can hope to contain the evil that is growing within the borders of this small New England town.
Amazon
Format: Movie (Netflix), starring Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Sara Paxton, and more
Release date: September 23, 2022
In one of her most ambitious works, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker — the child, the woman, the fated celebrity, and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist — intensely conflicted and driven — who had lost her way.
A powerful portrait of Hollywood’s myth and an extraordinary woman’s heartbreaking reality, “Blonde” is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great 20th-century American star.
Amazon
Format: Movie (Netflix), starring Sophia Anne Caruso, Sofia Wylie, Jamie Flatters, and more
Release date: September 2022
With her glass slippers and devotion to good deeds, Sophie knows she’ll earn top marks at the School for Good and join the ranks of past students like Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Snow White. Meanwhile, Agatha, with her shapeless black frocks and wicked black cat, seems a natural fit for the villains in the School for Evil.
The two girls soon find their fortunes reversed — Sophie’s dumped in the School for Evil to take Uglification, Death Curses, and Henchmen Training, while Agatha finds herself in the School for Good, thrust among handsome princes and fair maidens for classes in Princess Etiquette and Animal Communication.
But what if the mistake is actually the first clue to discovering who Sophie and Agatha really are?
Amazon
Format: Movie, starring Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan, Andre Braugher, and more
Release date: November 18, 2022
For many years, reporters had tried to get to the truth about Harvey Weinstein’s treatment of women. Rumors of wrongdoing had long circulated. But in 2017, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey began their investigation into the prominent Hollywood producer for the New York Times, his name was still synonymous with power. During months of confidential interviews with top actresses, former Weinstein employees, and other sources, many disturbing and long-buried allegations were unearthed, and a web of onerous secret payouts and nondisclosure agreements was revealed.
Nothing could have prepared Kantor and Twohey for what followed the publication of their initial Weinstein story on October 5, 2017. Within days, a veritable Pandora’s box of sexual harassment and abuse was opened. Women all over the world came forward with their own traumatic stories. Over the next 12 months, hundreds of men from every walk of life and industry were outed following allegations of wrongdoing. But did too much change — or not enough?
Amazon
Format: Movie (Apple TV+), starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, and more
Release date: November 2022
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances.
In this last remnant of the Wild West, many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll climbed to more than 24, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. Together with the Osage, they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Amazon
Format: Movie, starring Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, and more
Release date: December 23, 2022
France, 1939 – In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France… but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious 18-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can… completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life to save others.
Amazon
Format: Series (Amazon), starring Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Suki Waterhouse, Camila Morrone, and more
Release date: 2022
Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity… until now.
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ‘n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
Amazon
Format: Movie (Netflix), starring Niamh Algar, Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, and more
Release date: 2022
In this masterpiece by Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of “Room,” an English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle — a girl said to have survived without food for a month — and soon finds herself fighting to save the child’s life.
“The Wonder” works beautifully on many levels — a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.
Amazon
Format: Series (Amazon), starring Auliʻi Cravalho, John Leguizamo, Toheeb Jimoh, and more
Release date: 2022
In “The Power,” the world is a recognizable place: there’s a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family.
But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effects. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.