Oscar winner Tom Hanks’s debut novel has been announced, and is due out next year. The book, Hanks’s second foray into fiction – he published a short story collection in 2017 – has been described by its publisher as a “wildly ambitious” story about the making of a film.
The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece spans 80 years, and culminates in the opening of the titular movie, which is a “colossal, star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film” inspired by a comic book.
Characters include 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 and a tireless production assistant.
The novel will be published by Penguin Random House (PRH) and is scheduled to come out in both the UK and the US on 9 May 2023.
Hanks, who won best actor Oscars for his roles in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, said: “Movie making is very hard work over a very long period of time that consists of so many moments of joy slapped up against an equal number of feelings of self-loathing. It is the greatest job in the world and the most confounding of labours that I know of.”
Quoting from Hamlet, he continued: “I hope the book captures as much of ‘the accidental judgements and casual slaughter’ that go into a motion picture’s dictum to hold ‘a mirror up to nature’ that I have witnessed (and caused) since I joined the Screen Actors Guild.”
Ailah Ahmed, publishing director at Hutchinson Heinemann, the imprint of PRH that is publishing Hanks’ book in the UK, said working on the actor’s debut was “a publisher’s dream come true”.
“The fact that he has written an epic about ordinary people in a rather extraordinary world, and one that is thoughtful, poignant and hugely entertaining is icing on the cake,” she added.
Uncommon Type, Hanks’s short story collection, focused on his collection of vintage typewriters. The book has sold 234,000 copies in the UK to date, according to PRH.
Mark Lawson, in his Guardian review of Uncommon Type, said it was “perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for the actor to be goaded into publishing his own prose”, while Alex Preston, reviewing for the Observer, said “Hanks’s stories … are forgettable, middle-of-the-road and touched by the special banality of mere competence”.
