My friend Lorelei and I set aside a day each week for creative activities. One of our projects was to write a screenplay for a throm-com (thriller-romantic-comedy—yes, we coined the term). We soon realised we were doing much more time-wasting than planned. For example, Lorelei might ask: ‘What would a dreadlocked counsellor working in a nursing home be called?’ A solid hour of listing names would follow, before we’d settle on ‘Eric’.

So for practical reasons, we decided to retire our pens and find a novel to adapt into a blockbuster instead. So I launched into a reading list with adaptation in mind.