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Audiobooks read by Oscar winners and nominees

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An exclusive short story from Tom Hanks’ Uncommon Type

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William Heinemann to publish Tom Hanks

Some Stories

Uncommon Type

WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR 
 
'Impressive' The Times 
'Funny and pitch perfect' Sunday Express 
'I blink, bubble and boggle in amazed admiration' Stephen Fry 
'These stories are a hit' Financial Times 
 
A small-town newspaper columnist with old-fashioned views of the modern world. A World War II veteran grappling with his emotional and physical scars. A second-rate actor plunged into sudden stardom and a whirlwind press junket. Four friends travelling to the moon in a rocket ship built in the backyard. These are just some of the stories that Tom Hanks captures with great affection, humour and insight - the human condition in all its foibles.

Mr. Hanks turns out to be as authentically genuine a Writer with a capital W as ever touched a typewriter key. The stories in Uncommon Type range from the hilarious to the deeply touching. They move in period, location and manner, but all demonstrate a joy in writing, a pleasure in communicating an intensely American sense of atmosphere, friendship, life and family that is every bit as smart, engaging and humane as the man himself. All with that extra quality of keenly observant and sympathetic intelligence that has always set Tom Hanks apart. I blink, bubble and boggle in amazed admiration.

Reading Tom Hanks’s Uncommon Type is like finding out that Alice Munro is also the greatest actress of our time.

All American life is here ... Delightful ... Hanks’s prose is impressive, with a strong voice and stylistic flair ... so fluent, convincing and confident that you forget it belongs to Tom Hanks, movie star. He's just a writer. And he’s going to write a great novel one day.

On the page, as on screen, Hanks is, simply, a lovely person to be around ... Hanks captures the child’s-eye view of the world with pitch-perfect accuracy … and as a writing project it nails perhaps the hardest thing of all: a story in which nothing and everything happens.

The central quality to Tom’s writing is a kind of poignant playfulness. It’s exactly what you hope from him, except you wish he was sitting in your home, reading it aloud to you, one story at a time.

[Tom Hanks's] first collection of stories reverses the trick, unveiling the inventive mind behind his regular-guy façade ... His characters, like the machines on which he creates them, are idiosyncratic, disconnected from the mainstream ... There’s darkness too: infidelity, war, Hollywood press junkets. Hanks’s voice is as direct and dry as the one we know from his films ... Hanks has played so many roles. Of course they will have rubbed off, on him and on us. His book reflects that variety. You never know what you’re gonna get next.

It turns out that Tom Hanks is also a wise and hilarious writer with an endlessly surprising mind. Damn it.

Uncommon Type is funny, wise, gloriously inventive and humane. Tom Hanks sees inside people - a wary divorcee, a billionaire trading desire for disaster, a boy witnessing his father’s infidelity, a motley crew shooting for the moon – with such acute empathy and good humour we’d follow him anywhere. The cumulative effect is of a world I didn’t want to leave.

The great strengths of this collection are decency and sentimentality.

Wait – Tom Hanks can write, too? Funny, moving, deftly surprising stories? That's just swell. Maybe there's no crying in baseball, pal, but it's perfectly acceptable in the book business. That's how we drown envy.

It makes perfect sense that his first foray into fiction writing, with the short-story collection Uncommon Type, embodies the same all-American spirit … He can write engagingly … He has a particular aptitude for writing dialogue, perhaps unsurprisingly, and a wry turn of phrase that blooms at times into rollicking repartee … The past comes into play much more powerfully when Hanks asks implicit questions about how America has changed, particularly in the welcome it offers to immigrants … These are picaresque characters, enacting stories of friendship and adventure … There is life here, and humour, along with evocative moments of reflection on the state of the American dream. It is clear that Hanks is aiming for entertainment and whimsy over any attempt at high literary style. And on those terms, these stories are a hit.

Hanks can write. These pieces, some of which feature recurring characters and many of which explore the classic American short story territory of small-town life, have the authentic, worn-in feel of a favourite pair of jeans.

It’s impossible not to love Tom Hanks’ new book … each story is utterly charming and a delight to devour.

He isn’t a competent writer, he’s an excellent writer.

Tom Hanks is as natural on paper as he is on the big screen …Tom Hanks is a natural born storyteller ... You can hear his voice and feel the warm glow of his genial personality in Uncommon Type … There is an ease in his writing and a pleasure in the reading. He is clearly someone who delights in the rhythm and pacing found in a finely crafted paragraph ... He belongs to a tradition of American storytellers that includes Mark Twain or O'Henry although there is a range of work in Uncommon Type that defies such a catch-all definition ... has echoes of HG Wells and Philip K Dick … Uncommon Type has tales of fractured families and broken hearts, faltering relationships and people who are happy being just the way they are … There is a dark side to some of the stories but the overriding impression is that Hanks is an incorrigible romantic and a cock-eyed optimist.

He’s a bona fide superstar in the acting world and now Tom Hanks is setting the literary world ablaze … Stephen Fry loved it, and so do we.

There always comes a slight wariness when we discover that someone who is generally renowned for one thing turns out to be very good at something else … But what makes Uncommon Type even harder to dismiss is the silky-smooth momentum and unforced hum that Hanks' writing glides along with here.

Hanks can write the hell out of typing, and his dialogue is excellent, too…While these stories have the all-American sweetness, humour, and heart we associate with his screen roles, Hanks writes like a writer, not a movie star.

Funny and moving, with a wide spectrum of subjects, this is an engaging collection.

Uncommon Type is actually, much like its author, a warm, gently funny and mostly engaging collection of seventeen stories

It’s brilliant … A beautiful collection of short stories.

They’re all beautifully written and full of heart.

Sensitive, often witty and sometimes melancholic reflections.

Unveil[s] the inventive mind behind his regular-guy façade.

Perfect for book lovers and cinephiles alike.

Hanks’ measured storytelling makes the collection an addictive read.

Startlingly good… A spellbinding easygoing read, it is hard to find any fault, other than that Hanks is annoyingly talented and yet still somehow remains impossible to dislike.

Startlingly good … each of these 17 stories leap out from the page in their authenticity and whimsicality … A spellbindingly easygoing read, it is hard to find fault.

Behind the collection is a warmth and humanity.

A spellbindingly easygoing read, it is hard to find fault.

Rich range of subject matter and emotions.

Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type.

Tom Hanks

'A stunning, emotionally satisfying tale about the art of storytelling. I never wanted the lights to come up. I could not put it down' GRAHAM NORTON 
 
'It's its own universe, complete with a sun, a cast of circling planets, and a limitless number of stars. Its gravity pulls you in and its far reaching, multi-layered, rollicking exuberance holds you in place. I would have been happy to live inside this book forever' ANN PATCHETT 
 
A wildly ambitious story of the making of a colossal, star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film, and the humble comic book that inspired it all. 
 
Spanning 80 years of a changing America and culminating in the opening of the film, we meet a colourful cast of characters including a troubled soldier returning from war, a young boy with an artistic gift, an inspired and eccentric director, a pompous film star on the rise, a tireless production assistant and countless film crew members that together create Hollywood magic. 
 
Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece offers an insider's take on the momentous efforts it takes to make a film. At once a reflection on America's past and present, on the world of show business and the real world we all live in. 
 
Praise for Tom Hanks: 
 
'Authentically geniune . . . a Writer with a capital W.' Stephen Fry 
'Hanks's prose is impressive . . . fluent, convincing and confident.' The Times 
'Tom Hanks is a wise and hilarious writer with an endlessly surprising mind.' Steve Martin