Book Recs for Broadway fans - this Book Lovers Day, why not try out some of these page-to-stage originals?

Les Miserables

A critical failure but commercial success on its 1862 publication, Victor Hugo's sprawling novel is now considered one of the greatest ever written and is an ultimate read for musical fans. This 1000+ page brick of a book offers a wealth of information, characters and backstory that the musical just couldn't distill into its two and half hour runtime, giving readers a greater understanding of Jean ValJean's epic run from justice and a thorough exploration of France post-revolution.

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Matilda

Published in 1988, Roald Dahl's Matilda has since become an international bestseller. Offering a classic Dahlian tale of a young girl whose love of reading awakens a magic power that defends her from her loathsome family and terrifying principal, it's an inspiring read for young bookworms. While it can't teach us telekinesis (oh how we tried), it instilled in this writer a love of literature and libraries, that continues to thrive.

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Wicked

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, this prequel to the events of Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz by Gregory Maguire was published in 1995 before making musical magic less than a decade later. An exploration of the nature of evil, Maguire's novel follows Elphaba from her birth to her later transition to the Wicked Witch of the West. Born with green skin and a savage' demeanor, it asks if we can be born evil or if it is something that can be manufactured along the way.

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Phantom Of The Opera

Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera was first seen in French newspaper Le Gaulois from September 1909 to January 1910. Based on the happenings of the Paris Opera, this early 20th-century gothic mystery follows chorus girl Christine and her obsessive fanthe titular Phantomas he attempts to win her heart via increasingly unhinged and dangerous means. A slow mover in its native France, the novel found new life as early as 1925 when the first film adaptation was made.

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Hamilton

When Ron Chernow published his autobiography of founding father Alexander Hamilton in 2004, little could he know its impact. A detailed account of Hamilton's life, including his letters and contemporary sources, it won the first George Washington Book Prize and spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller listlater returning in 2015 after the release of Lin-Manuel Miranda's landmark musical, on which Chernow worked as a historical consultant!

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The Color Purple

Published in 1982, Alice Walker's The Color Purple takes us back to the American South of the early 1900s, where a young woman tries to make sense of her difficult life in her letters to God. Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (making Walker the first black woman winner), it was quickly made into a film by Stephen Spielberg in 1985, before finding success as a musical in 2005. A challenging but vital read, Walker's novel illuminates the female black experience of the time. Unsurprisingly it has caused controversy with censors, landing on the American Library Association's list of Challenged books many times in the past three decades. Conversely, it is also listed on the PBS Great American Read Top 100 and the BBC's 100 Most Influential Novels.

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Goodbye To Berlin

The story of Cabaret comes from writer Christopher Isherwood's semi-autobiographical 1939 novel, Goodbye To Berlin. A series of tales about Isherwood's days in the German capital during the Weimar Republic, it tells the story of Isherwood and his roommate, nightclub singer Sally Bowles (aka Jean Ross), and their exploits during Hitler's terrifying rise to power. It first hit Broadway as a play titled I Am a Camera' in 1951 before the iconic musical production from Kander and Ebb opened in 1966. While the events detailed are nearly 90 years old, the themes of fascism, erasure, and societal division are sadly recognizable to today's readers. If there is one book that Broadway fans should read, it is Goodbye To Berlin.

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