LATEST TITLES

UNCOMMON TYPE: SOME STORIES by Tom Hanks, William Heinemann, £16.99, ebook £9.99 HE’S a two-time Oscar winner, Hollywood royalty and widely considered an all-round nice guy. And Tom Hanks can now add writer to his already impressive credentials.

He has just published his debut collection of short stories, Uncommon Type, and in contrast to many other bigtime actors that have attempted fiction writing, these tales are startlingly good.

Themed around Hanks’ appreciation for typewriters, each of these 17 stories leap out from the page in their authenticity and whimsicality.

There’s a second-rate actor who experiences fleeting fame on a junket tour, a young hipster who mistakenly buys a toy typewriter from a charity shop, a pair of polar opposite pals that embark on a side-splitting fling and a World War II veteran struggling with posttraumatic stress disorder.

A spellbindingly easygoing read, it is hard to find fault. A POCKETFUL OF CROWS by Joanne M Harris, Gollancz, £12.99, ebook £6.99 NO stranger to the genres of myth and magic realism, Joanne Harris takes inspiration from one of the 19th-century Child Ballads (traditional ballads collected by Francis James Child) to craft a story of love, betrayal and terrible revenge.

A nameless girl who lives in the woods falls for the son of a Scottish laird, but after he rejects her as too wild for his restricted, aristocratic life, she calls upon ancient powers to help obliterate her feelings.

Harris’ descriptive skills embroider emotional details onto familiar folkloric themes such as witchcraft, shapeshifting and the fragility of civilisation. While the characters are needfully sketched in broad strokes, this never feels patronising and sits perfectly within Harris’ catalogue of eerie, beguiling tales.