THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE

That book is Purradise, an epic fantasy filled with fallen knights, singing mountains, grief, courage, cats and a mysterious Wound in the sky. It is Localad's masterpiece—or at least he hopes it is. The problem is that nobody has ever read it, nobody is particularly likely to, and Harbour & Page is rapidly running out of money.

Then Hollywood walks through the door.

When producer Desmond Ferris's car breaks down outside the bookshop, he enters looking for a telephone and leaves carrying Localad's manuscript. Before long, Hollywood wants to turn Purradise into a major motion picture.

For a man who has spent most of his life behind a bookshop counter, it seems impossible. Localad is transported from quiet Meridian Cove to Los Angeles, where his deeply personal story becomes raw material for an industry with very definite ideas about what audiences want.

Unfortunately, few of those ideas involve the book Localad actually wrote.

Studio executives want greater commercial appeal. Market research demands changes. Script notes multiply. Franchise possibilities emerge. The quiet moments are troublesome. Grief needs more revenge. The ending needs more explosions. And action star Brick Holland is considerably easier to market than almost anything Localad originally imagined.

Localad watches as compromise after compromise transforms his story into something increasingly difficult to recognise. What began as an opportunity to save his bookshop and realise his lifelong dream becomes a battle over authorship, ownership and the uncomfortable difference between having your name on something and still being able to call it yours.

By the time Purradise reaches its spectacular Hollywood premiere, Localad has learned one inconvenient truth about success: sometimes getting what you wished for is merely the universe demonstrating why wishes should contain considerably more legal detail.

But Hollywood has overlooked something.

The original book still exists.

Back in Meridian Cove, Localad discovers that the rights to his actual novel remain his. He publishes Purradise himself, exactly as he intended: a simple black book containing his story, his characters and, most importantly, his ending.

Readers discover it. Then booksellers discover it. Then the internet does what the internet does.

Comparisons between Localad's quiet, emotionally complex novel and Hollywood's spectacular adaptation spread online until eight innocent words become an unexpected phenomenon:

THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE.

Suddenly the manuscript Hollywood considered merely source material becomes successful in its own right. Independent bookshops champion it, readers recommend it, awards notice it and Localad finds himself facing an entirely different kind of success—one that arrives without requiring him to surrender the parts of the story that mattered most.

Yet his greatest victory isn't sales, recognition or literary acclaim. It is finally understanding what the experience has taught him.

Some things are worth changing. Some compromises are necessary. Some dreams look very different once you finally reach them.

And some things simply aren't for sale.

Warm, sharply funny and unexpectedly moving, The Book's a Lot Better Than the Movie is a contemporary comic novel about books, Hollywood, friendship, creativity, late-blooming dreams and second chances. It is the story of an ordinary man who spends twenty years trying to become a successful writer, only to discover that success isn't really the point.

Because sometimes the most important story isn't the one that makes you famous.

It's the one you can still recognise as your own when everybody else has finished trying to improve it.

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