Novelist and short story writer Ethel White was born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876. She worked for the government at the Ministry of Pensions in London and began writing fiction in the 1920s. She made her writing debut with the mainstream novel The Wish-Bone (1927). After two more mainstream novels, Twill Soon Be Dark (1929) and The Eternal Journey (1930), she began writing thriller and mystery novels, where her popularity flourished for the next 14 years.

Her novel The Spiral Staircase was made into a film by director Robert Sidomark, but White's best-known and most successful work remains The Wheel Spins, on which Hitchcock based his film The Lady Vanishes. The Lady Vanishes was remade in the 1970s and starred Cybil Shepherd. More recently, The Lady Vanishes has enjoyed a successful run as a play.

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From classic book to classic film, RosettaBooks has gathered some of most memorable books into film available. The selection is broad ranging and far reaching, with books from classic genre to cult classic to science fiction and horror and a blend of the two creating whole new genres like Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man. Classic works from Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, meet with E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Whether the work is centered in the here and now, in the past, or in some distant and almost unimaginable future, each work is lasting and memorable and award-winning.