Read the books, see the films

American fiction adaptations from the awards season 2010

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places. "Spare, beautiful and brutal prose... The Lovely Bones is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing." The Times.

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Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

This is the story of Precious Jones, a sixteen year old illiterate black girl who has never been out of Harlem. She is pregnant by her own father for the second time, and kicked out of school when that pregnancy becomes obvious. Placed in an alternative teaching programme, she is urged to write down her thoughts in a diary.

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The Lovely Bones

Precious

Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

Ryan Bingham's job as a Career Transition Counselor (he fires people) has kept him airborne for years. He hates his job, but he loves 'Airworld', finding happiness in pressurized cabins and anonymous hotel rooms, and pursuing a noble ultimate goal: one million frequent flier miles. With sharp wit, and wisdom, Up in the Air combines brilliant social observation with an acute sense of the modern mind. It is a story for unsettled times.