I am always drawn to titles that are acquired for film/tv adaptations. What is it about a particular book that makes it screen-worthy? How enchanting is a story if it stays with an actor/producer long after the last page has been turned? This is why I follow Reese Witherspoon and her wildly popular book club on Instagram (#rwbookclub). She has a knack for turning books into stars! (WILD, GONE GIRL, BIG LITTLE LIES, to name a few)
More and more celebrities are finding their next film and television projects in the books they read. Most recently Jessica Biel fell in love with a novel called THE SINNER and turned it into a surprise summer hit on USA.
One of the newest titles to be scooped up for the big screen is Matt Haig’s HOW TO STOP TIME. Variety reports that Benedict Cumberbatch is set to star in the imaginative novel about a man who doesn’t age. It is “a wildly imagined love story that spans centuries and continents, and cements Haig’s reputation as one of the most original and exciting novelists of his generation.”
SUMMARY:
I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.
Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret.
He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries. From Elizabethan England to Jazz Age Paris, from New York to the South Seas, Tom has seen a lot, and now craves an ordinary life. Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom has the perfect cover – working as a history teacher at a London comprehensive. Here he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he’d never witnessed them first-hand. He can try and tame the past that is fast catching up with him.
The only thing Tom mustn’t do is fall in love.
How to Stop Time is a wild and bittersweet story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change and about the lifetimes it can take to really learn how to live.
