By Claire Buss, Deputy Editor, Write On! 

At Write On! and Pen to Print, we want to help connect authors and readers, playwrights and audiences, so we’ve created a Spotlight page on the last Saturday of the month, showcasing some of the exciting new reads and plays available. The curated list is based on books and plays that you send us, so if you’re an author or a playwright and you’d like your book or play in the spotlight, reach out to us at pentoprint@lbbd.gov.uk. Whether you’re an indie author, with a small press or mainstream publisher, established or brand new playwright, we’d love to hear from you and shine a light on your new work.

Write On! offers other opportunities for writers as well. If you’d like us to feature an extract from your book or a short story, please send the extract, book cover and blurb to pentoprint@lbbd.gov.uk with the subject: Write On! Showcase (ensuring you have your publisher’s permission, of course).

Pen to Print are also looking for short videos from people reading a passage from their favourite book, or authors reading extracts from their own books. These videos will be featured on the Pen to Print YouTube channel and across our social media. Please send in your videos or links to pentoprint@lbbd.gov.uk with the subject: Video Stories.

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Shadows In The Sand by TWM Ashford

No amount of shore leave can wash away this crew’s sins.

Against all odds, the crew of the Silver Hart are filthy rich. So they do what any sensible bunch of ex-pirates would do – they splash out on a lavish all-inclusive resort away from the riff-raff they usually associate with.

But after poachers attack their luxury yacht during a sightseeing tour, Sheni discovers an underwater community just off the coast. Unfortunately, the aquatic Plillup aren’t any more pleased to meet him than the hunters above the waves. And behind all the palm trees and pedicures, even the resort isn’t quite as it seems…

With the pirate life behind them, it’s time for Sheni and Gecki to put down their margaritas and decide what kind of heroes they want to be.

Available to buy here
Connect with TWM Ashford

Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi

A piercing debut about how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves.

Framed by the story of escape from a toxic marriage, Chaotic Good focuses on the incremental ways in which power accumulates, shifts and is relinquished within both home and community.

Incisive, rigorous and artful, Isabelle Baafi reminds us of the importance of self-determination, and how, when we feel most eroded, we might discover what we need deep within ourselves: This time and every time, I was the code I needed to find my way back.

Not That Kind Of Hero by Alexia Casale

The Pretender by Jo Harkin

All The Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman

Maybe having a few enemies on the school run means you’re doing something right…

Florence knows all about failure. After a dismal end to her 2000s girlband career, she’s moping around West London, single, broke and unfulfilled. The only things she’s proud of are her increasingly elaborate nail art choices – and her ten-year-old son, Dylan.

But when Alfie Risby, Dylan’s bitter class rival and the child heir to a frozen foods empire, mysteriously vanishes on a school trip, Dylan becomes a prime suspect. Florence has to get her act together, find the missing boy and clear her son’s name or risk losing him forever. The only problem? She doesn’t have any detective skills, she’s not exactly popular at the school gates and she’s just found Alfie’s backpack hidden under Dylan’s bed…

Available to buy here
Connect with Sarah Harman

Starminster by Megan Hopkins

Astrid has lived in the rhubarb shed her whole life.

The outside world is dangerous, Mama explains; she will understand when she’s older, but she cannot set foot beyond the door. Astrid longs to see the world; to meet other children; to live in the farmhouse with Mama. But what she longs for most of all is to see the stars.

Then one night, a stranger unlocks the shed: a stranger with wings. She has come to take Astrid to a secret city in the sky called London Overhead, far above the highest peak of the Shard. For Astrid, like her, is a Librae – and will soon grow wings of her own . . .

Astrid is swept into a breathtaking and magical world of new friendships, epic adventures and unimaginable discoveries at the ancient, beautiful school for Librae students: Starminster. But quickly she learns that all is not well in the glimmering city. And when rumours abound of missing children in London Underfoot, she begins to realise that Mama may have been right about the dangers waiting for Astrid all along . . .

Available to buy here
Connect with Megan Hopkins

The Misadventures Of Mina Mahmood by Farhana Islam

Welcome to the joyous world of Mina and best friends Reema and Mobeen!

Mina, Reema and Mobeen can’t wait to go on their school trip, an overnight stay at Shiremoor Oaks Adventure Centre . . . until somebody spooks them with stories about Bertie Blackteeth: who haunts the woods, who sharpens her toenails with twigs, who is waiting to skewer her next unfortunate victim all over with cheese-and-onion crisps!

With Bertie Blackteeth lurking and the school bully seeming to have become the teacher’s pet,  this trip will test their friendship, courage and love of potato chips to the limit.

Available to buy here
Connect with Farhana Islam

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty

 

On a plane bound for Sydney, the unassuming woman from seat 4D walks down the aisle making unsettling predictions about the passengers.

And six strangers find their lives unexpectedly crossing.

Each tries to put the experience behind them. But, just weeks later, they can’t any longer.

Because not believing a prediction is easy, until it comes true.

Available to buy here
Connect with Liane Moriarty

This Is Not A Game by Kelly Mullen

Two unlikely detectives. A killer cocktail of suspects.

A Gibson martini garnished with three silverskin onions is 77-year-old Mimi’s favourite cocktail. It is best served with a crossword puzzle, not as an apéritif at Jane Ireland’s extravagant auction party.

But given Mimi has been blackmailed into attending Jane’s event, at a grand old mansion on Mackinac Island (Michigan’s answer to The Hamptons), there are worse drinks she could spend an evening sinking.

Thankfully for her, she’s roped her granddaughter, Addie – who is escaping the heartache caused by her manipulative ex-fiancé – into accompanying her. While Addie spots celebrities and socialites in the manor’s labyrinth of dark rooms and Mimi wonders how to confess the real reason for her presence at the soiree, a scream pierces the air.

Jane is dead.

When a second body turns up, Mimi and Addie soon become the unlikeliest of sleuths in a race to narrow down the suspects.

In a house that contains as many secrets as the people within it, it’s going to take more than a Gibson to survive the night…

Available to buy here
Connect with Kelly Mullen

The Line They Drew Through Us by Hiba Noor Khan

 

Three best friends are born on the same day under miraculous circumstances.

But by their 12th birthday, Jahan, Ravi and Lakshmi’s lives are about to change forever.

The British announce Indian independence and draw lines of Partition that tear apart the country, and the friends.

One of them flees, one of them disappears, and the other is left wondering, could a miracle bring them back together?

Available to buy here
Connect with Hiba Noor Khan

Salka by Francesca Simon

The moment I saw her face.
The moment I heard her siren song . . .

Salka, the faerie Lady of the Lake, can’t help but appear to Owain, a shepherd who has already captured her heart. He needs only to see her to fall deeply in love. But her father has one condition on their marriage: if Owain strikes her three times she must return to the Lake forever. Despite their married bliss, Salka is not like the other inhabitants in this small village. Gossip turns against her and as prejudice and suspicion breed, Owain finds himself wishing his wife was more ordinary, that she tried harder to fit in, that she was less . . . herself.

What is more of a strike than to question her very nature? The first heart-blow is struck. And now, desperately, their future lies in his hands . . .

Available to buy here

The Forgotten Book Club by Kate Storey

Life can begin with a single story. You just have to bring your own book…

For three decades, Grace supported her husband Frank’s passion for books, despite not being a reader herself. Since his passing, their shelves echo longingly, and Grace’s heartache has only grown.

When Grace’s grandson suggests joining Frank’s old book club to feel closer to him again, Grace reluctantly agrees. Yet, upon arrival, she discovers this isn’t a typical book club: here, members settle in for an hour of reading… in silence.

Disappointed by the sparse attendance and confused by the lack of chatter, Grace flees. But when fellow member, Annie, convinces her to stay, Grace is determined to ensure that neither Frank – nor his beloved book club – are forgotten.

And as she breathes new life into the group, Grace might just find this is where she truly belongs. Because this next chapter of life could be the beginning of her story…

Available to buy here
Connect with Kate Storey

What If I Never Get Over You by Paige Toon

The greater the love, the harder the fall…

Ellie didn’t expect to fall in love while travelling in Europe. But she also didn’t expect to meet a man like Ash.

Three blistering days in Lisbon is all it takes to form an unforgettable connection – deep enough for them to plan to meet again in Madrid. But Ellie arrives late, and Ash is nowhere to be found.

Six years later, the memory of Ash and their time together still burns deeply in Ellie’s heart. She hopes her dream job as a gardener on a grand estate in Wales will bring the fresh start she desperately needs.

But when Ash unexpectedly crashes back into her life, Ellie is forced to question if the universe has other plans…

Available to buy here
Connect with Paige Toon

Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith

A rebellious new history of female friendship and timely reclamation of the ‘bad friend’.

Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. The dangerously romantic schoolgirls of the 1900s. The office gossips of the 1930s. The Mum cliques of the 1950s. The angry activists of the 1970s. The coven – women who choose to live together in old age – of the present day. These ‘bad’ friends broke the rules about femininity they didn’t write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful.

In this history of women’s friendship, celebrated cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith reckons with the ways we understand this complex and vital connection. She takes us from Japan to the Ivory Coast, The Mindy Project to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, from prisons to film sets to hospital wards and elder communities, untangling the assumptions about good and bad friends we live by. Weaving together history, interviews and memoir, Bad Friend offers what’s long overdue: a more expansive, more rebellious vision of friendship fit for twenty-first-century life.

Available to buy here

Maiden Mother Crone by Madeleine F White

Maiden Mother Crone is a memoir in verse, challenging the traditional approach to faith by putting Madeleine’s own stories at the heart of a narrative defined by a quest for spiritual identity.

Encased within the spiritual feminine, it offers magic and mysticism, abuse and reconciliation, power and perception and faith and feminism. This collection is a ‘cri de coeur’ for women who may have been sidelined, abused and disenfranchised to find their own seat at the table.

Taking its cues from the older, more matriarchal nature and Celtic and Nordic traditions, Maiden Mother Crone takes us on a journey from ‘mother goddess’ to modern faith. With inclusion and spiritual expression at the heart of it, the collection calls upon us to find a new way to be and to connect; reminding us that as ‘Maidens, Mothers and Crones’ we speak the same fundamental truths the world over.

I’ll weave pixels into promises and shared words into prayers of hope, and so transform this world of men to somewhere crones can fly again.

Maiden Mother Crone is part of the acclaimed Crossing Places series.

Available to buy here
Connect with Madeleine F White

Remember, if you’re an author and you’d like to see your book in our Saturday Spotlight, email: pentoprint@lbbd.gov.uk and send us the details of your new novel.

For details of Penguin RandomHouse new releases, visit their website here.
For details of Hachette new releases, visit their website here.
For details of HarperCollins new releases, visit their website here.
For details of PanMacmillan new releases, visit their website here.
For details of Simon & Schuster new releases, visit their website here.

Disclaimer: Amazon links are given for ease but please remember there are a number of other online retailers operating, including hive (which helps to support independent book shops), Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play and Nook as well as online stores for bookstores such as Waterstones, Barnes & Noble and WHSmiths. 

Issue 24 of Write On! is out now and you can read it online here. Find it in libraries and other outlets. You can find previous editions of our magazines here.

You can hear great new ideas, creative work and writing tips on Write On! Audio. Find us on all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Google Podcasts and Spotify. Type Pen to Print into your browser and look for our logo, or find us on Podcasters.Spotify.com.