Saturday Spotlight: New Book Releases February 2026

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.

*****

Double Indemnity

Tuesday 31 March – Saturday 4 April 2026, Palace Theatre Southend.

A thrilling masterpiece of murder, deceit and mystery. One of the greatest crime novels of the 20th Century comes to life on stage, starring Hollywood icon Mischa Barton (The OC).

Los Angeles, 1930’s. Amidst the wreckage of the Great Depression, Walter Huff, a sharp-eyed insurance salesman, has built his career spotting scams. But when he meets the dangerously seductive Phyllis Nirdlinger (Barton) to discuss her husband’s life insurance policy, he finds himself drawn into a web of lust, greed and betrayal. Together they plot the perfect crime: murder the husband, cash in the policy and disappear into the Californian sunset.

But passion can cloud judgement, and guilt can corrode the most perfect of plans. With each step increasingly risky and as mistrust simmers, will Walter and Phyllis outsmart the law  – or each other?

Book Tickets

*****

Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen

 

Available to buy here

The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer

 

A summer’s evening in 1926, and six-year-old Celie Shepherd is hungry, desperate and dangling from a cliff, as she stretches out to steal something impossible. 

The bold theft will change Celie’s life, and the lives of many others.

One hundred years later, a remote home is ransacked by masked men. The only thing taken: a dusty box containing that same impossible thing. What could be so unique – and so valuable – that it is stolen again and again… and again?

Available to buy here

Shared Secrets For The Home Front by Rachel Brimble

 

Available to buy here
Connect with Rachel Brimble

Murder At The Monastery by Reverend Richard Coles

Canon Daniel Clement has suffered a secret humiliation and to recover takes respite at the monastery where he was a novice.

But the monastery doesn’t allow the break he needs, for tensions are building there too. There is a death at the monastery, and Daniel thinks it might be murder.

Meanwhile, back at Champton, Daniel is the subject of village gossip, his mother Audrey is up to something again, there’s trouble at the dress shop, trouble up at the big house, and the puppies are running riot.

The Exes by Leodora Darlington

A Cottage In The Country by Katie Fford

She’s found her dream home but can she make her dreams a reality?

Hattie finds other people their dream homes for a living.

Surely she, of all people, has the connections and the knowledge to find her own forever home? Instead, she baffles those closest to her by choosing to pack up and move every few months from one housesitting job to the next.

Of course, that’s because she knows where she wants to live. It’s a beautiful house owned by a lovely old woman who’d simply love for Hattie to have it.

But nothing is ever that simple.

There’s Clive who refuses to listen to his great-aunt’s wishes about her house. There’s Luke, Hattie’s oldest friend, who just wants to see her happy. And there’s Hattie herself. It might take a difficult client, an awkward teenager and a couple of dogs to help her see what really makes a house a home.

Available to buy here
Connect with Katie Fforde

 

 

One Woman’s War by Rosie Goodwin

 

Nuneaton, 1914.

War is just around the corner and for Annie Lilburn and her adopted family, life will never be the same. Annie has never felt she fits in, but since Levi Lilburn, the local rag-and-bone man, took her under his wing and she became a business woman in her own right, things have been on the up. Soon that is set to change again when World War I is declared and the men of the town enlist.

Annie trains to become a nurse and finds herself on the battlefields in France. Through the devastation of war, love starts to bloom as she meets a young officer on a dangerous mission. Could this orphan girl finally be finding her place in the world and someone to truly love her, or is her happiness set to come crashing down once again?

Available to buy here

 

The Killing Time by Elly Griffiths

Join Ali Dawson and her cold case team for another thrilling case.

Ali Dawson is a police detective who leads a unit investigating cases so cold her team must travel to the distant past to solve them. But Ali and the team haven’t been allowed to time-travel ever since their technical expert, Jones, got stuck in Victorian London, never to be seen again.

To distract herself from meaningless tasks, Ali decides to look into a present-day case – an apparent suicide of a young man who fell to his death from a high building. She believes the death is linked to a psychic Medium, Barry Power, who convinced the boy he could fly. Ali goes to one of Power’s shows where he claims to be in contact with Jones.

When Ali notices that her cat, Terry, has gone missing, she decides to go back in time just long enough to prevent Terry from escaping through his open cat flap. A dangerous plan which backfires, and she finds herself once more in Victorian London, where she meets Jones, as well as Power, and the darkly mysterious Cain Templeton with whom Ali has unfinished business from her previous visit to the past.

Available to buy here
Connect with Elly Griffiths

 

Keshed by Stu Hennigan

In the derelict shell of what was once his family home, a dying man surveys the wreckage of his former life and drinks himself senseless, haunted by the chain of events that led him there.

Dark, complex and visceral, Keshed is an unflinching character study exploring class, belonging, fatherhood and conflicting ideals of modern masculinity.

At heart, it’s the story of a relationship struggling to cope with the impossible pressures of raising a child under late-stage capitalism; but it’s also a love letter to the working class North, from the grinding poverty of Thatcher’s 80’s to the present day.

Available to buy here

 

The Invitation by Veronica Henry

A secret love story.
A chance to stay forever…

London, 1953.

Clementine falls for handsome Alfie Arbutus over cocktails at the Savoy and knows that life will never be the same again. Especially when he invites her to visit the family home he will inherit one day, Foxwood Manor.

Stella lost a part of her heart forever when Edwin Arbutus died. Their wartime love affair changed everything, but now she has her young son, Ted, to fight for.

Elizabeth hopes that throwing the glamorous Snow Ball at Foxwood will bring light back into its darkened walls, and into the eyes of her heartbroken husband, Michael, for the first time since they lost their eldest son.

Yet as the gilded invitations are sent, the lives of all three women collide with unimaginable consequences. Will the secrets of the past break the family apart, or bring them back together?

Available to buy here
Connect with Veronica Henry

 

Bodily Fluids by Liam Hughes

The Greek physician Hippocrates thought the human body contained blood, phlegm and bile. In the right balance, these fluids produced health – if not, pain.

Liam Hughes is very familiar with bodily fluids. He spent nearly five decades on the NHS frontline, ultimately as a senior cardiologist. Extending the Hippocratic list to include sweat, tears, urine, solid waste and spunk (fortitude), he uses this framework to tell his own story of the highs and lows of hospital life. The terminal patient begging for a ‘Brompton cocktail’ to end his suffering, the loathsome on-call surgeon who impales himself on a shooting-stick, the selfless consultant who rams a police car to save a patient’s life: all shape Hughes’ strong sense of what the medical calling should and should not entail.

In a lively mixture of the lewd, the gross-out and the deeply humane, he conveys the pain, pleasure and pathos of hospital life. By turns moving, instructive, hilarious and outrageous, Bodily Fluids also expresses its author’s anxiety about the state of our health service – and offers a bold prescription for the way forward.

Available to buy here

 

You & Me And You & Me And You & Me by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees

 

What would you do if you could go back to the moment you fell in love?

Adam and Jules’s relationship has become a bit boring. Then Adam finds some unexpected magic in the old mixtapes they have kept in the attic. When he presses play, time rewinds.

Adam and Jules can now relive the moments that made them fall in love. Fix the mistakes. Choose differently. Perfect everything.

But the temptation to change the past is intoxicating. One small tweak leads to another, and things start to spiral out of control.

What makes love perfect? And what would you risk to get it?

Available to buy here
Connect with Josie Lloyd
Connect with Emlyn Rees

 

Just One More Day by Shari Low

A new dawn, and a new day. All they have to do is choose to leave the past behind.

Bernadette O’Brien walked away from a husband who cheated on her throughout her whole marriage. Today is the day she’ll decide between protecting her new life or risking it all for another shot at happiness.

Marge Drummond knows that now is the time to share a hidden truth with her daughter Estelle. But can she bring herself to admit the mistake that’s made her daughter’s whole life a lie?

Amber Collins is finally ready to embrace a new romance after a divorce that broke her heart. Will she find the love she deserves, or are her hopes and dreams about to come crashing down to earth?

Three women, three tangled webs of love and betrayal… When all the secrets come out, who will still believe in love at the end of the day?

Available to buy here
Connect with Shari Low

 

The Cromarty Library Circle by Shona MacLean

Cromarty, The Black Isle, 1831.

As seagulls shriek and rise on the coastal winds, a circulating library in the bustling port town of Cromarty is meeting for the first time.

Ostensibly united by a love of books, the demands of social convention have brought together a disparate group of people. Charlotte Mackenzie, the remote and fragile wife of the local laird, seeks an escape from a loveless marriage, her best friend, Rachel Mackay, a former governess who is ardently in love with her own older husband, the town’s minister, the young schoolmaster, John Learmonth, newly arrived from Edinburgh with secrets in tow, and the gentle bank clerk, Ludovic Cameron, who dreams of a new life across the ocean, far from his erstwhile schoolmate, the malevolent Farquhar Hossack. When the laird befriends a wounded officer, a chain of events is set into motion that threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium of the community.

Against the backdrop of mass emigrations, an encroaching cholera epidemic, political unrest and the campaign to abolish chattel slavery in the British Caribbean, the people of Cromarty must negotiate their new world and each other, flitting in and out of their lives through one extraordinary year.

Available to buy here
Connect with Shona MacLean

 

Banshee: Mythological Irish Women Retold Edited by Ailbhe Malone

In this spellbinding anthology, Ireland’s most electrifying female writers breathe new life into ancient Irish myths, reclaiming the stories of women who have too long stood in the shadows of warriors and kings.

Editor and journalist Ailbhe Malone was raised on these legends, but the women, always cast as mothers, warriors or witches, were never given the lead. And so Banshee was born: not just a retelling but a radical reclamation.

Banshee transports you to treacherous landscapes and salt-crashing seas, generational curses and mystical islands. Here, you’ll find unruly mothers, rule-breaking queens and women outrunning their destiny: stories pulsing with desire, danger and defiance.

This is a celebration of womanhood and an homage to the ancient stories that still shape us.

Available to buy here

 

The Departed by Sarah Mellor

Ask him to return the kiss when I draw my dying breath. St. Joseph, patron of departing souls – pray for me.

Liverpool, 1979: new CID recruit Leigh Borrowdale is seconded to a disturbing murder inquiry: a mysterious death in a decaying building, where the remains of a young man have been found.

Tasked with looking into missing persons’ cases to track down the identity of the victim, Leigh comes into contact with the disappeared of a city living through its darkest days of the winter of discontent.

As she faces her own family demons and battles the male-dominated world at work, Leigh discovers a connection to two boys feared drowned in the Mersey and links to the murky Liverpool underworld. Through it all her only ally is her colleague, DS Des Chung, who knows what it means to be an outsider in the police force; albeit one who takes a very different approach.

Available to buy here
Connect with Sarah Mellor

 

You Belong With Me by Beth Moran

Three times a fiancée but never a bride is not a claim to fame Bluebell Beddoes is proud of. But she is taking it as a sign…

Sworn off romance, instead the love of Blue’s life is the beautiful Isle of Siskin. Her home from birth, her community and now her job with the wildly successful podcast Only On Siskin. Her life is full and her future is set.

So, when the peace on Siskin is threatened with being destroyed forever, Blue knows she has to act. There are secrets from the past that may be able to save the future of the island, and only Blue can get to the bottom of them.

When handsome and mysterious Jonathan White arrives on Siskin, Blue is unsure if he’s here to help or hinder. But when it becomes clear Jonathan holds the key to unlocking the past, Blue will have to learn to trust again or risk losing everything she loves.

Available to buy here
Connect with Beth Moran

 

A Hymn To Life by Gisèle Pelicot

One November day, Gisèle Pelicot was called to a local police station and life as she knew it ended.

Her husband of 50 years had been caught by a supermarket guard filming up women’s skirts. But on his computer was shattering evidence: for nearly a decade, he had been secretly drugging and raping her and inviting dozens of strangers into their home to abuse her.

Four years later, he and 50 other men were put on trial and Gisèle’s courage in waiving her right to anonymity made global headlines. “Shame must change sides,” she declared, giving voice and hope to millions. Her words became a rallying cry and her decision marked a turning point in public feeling about sexual violence.

For the first time, and with unwavering honesty and grace, she describes a difficult childhood, first love, her career and motherhood. It’s a life in determined search of happiness, both before and after her devastating discovery. She is an ordinary person who faces extraordinary catastrophe, whose example changes the world.

Ultimately, Gisèle Pelicot emerges with a renewed passion and reverence for living, and for love. A Hymn To Life is an unforgettable testament and promise: that victims have no reason to feel ashamed, that even after unimaginable betrayal we can go on and that colour will always return to life.

Available to buy here

 

The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte 

 

To catch a killer, one must act the part.

Arriving on the Greek island of Utakos, ageing actor Ormond Basil hopes only for a holiday and perhaps finally to shed the mantle of his most famous role: world-renowned sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

But when a body turns up in his hotel, the other guests, accustomed to seeing Ormond as the greatest detective of all time on the silver screen, pressure him to solve the mystery.

Yet even with Ormond’s encyclopaedic knowledge of plots and killers, this case turns out to be anything but elementary.

Available to buy here
Connect with Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A Stranger In Corfu by Alex Preston

On the Greek island of Vidos, the past lingers like salt in the air. The inhabitants –former members of MI6  – are sent here to be forgotten. Exiled. Either too damaged or too compromised to be allowed to live freely.

For years, residents make the best of their fate: old enemies reconcile, long-lost friends swim together in the warm sea and estranged lovers share a bed once more. But secrets bind tightly. And when one of their own washes up dead, alliances fracture and a tide of suspicion begins to rise.

A vivid reimagining of a real, hidden slice of the British Intelligence Service’s history, A Stranger In Corfu is an exquisitely tense and masterfully spun novel about shadowy morality, unravelled secrets and the futility of trying to outrun the past.

Available to buy here
Connect with Alex Preston

 

Hotel Exile: Paris In The Shadow Of War by Jane Rogoyska

A meeting place for Europe’s bohemian artists. A headquarters of the Nazi occupation. A shelter for camp survivors.

This is the true story of how one Paris hotel came to hold the weight of a century.

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history.

In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps.

Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.

Available to buy here

 

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

It’s the summer of 1939. London is on the brink of catastrophic war.

Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young woman in the stuffy world of City finance, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a technical whizz at the BBC’s nascent television unit.

What was supposed to be one night of abandon draws her instead into an adventure of otherworldly pursuit –  into a reality where time bends, spirits can be summoned and history hangs by a thread. Soon there are Nazi planes overhead. But Iris has more to contend with than the terrors of the Blitz. Over the rooftops of burning London, in the twisted passages between past and present, a fascist fanatic is travelling with a gun in her hand.

And only Iris can stop her from altering the course of history forever.

Available to buy here
Connect with Francis Spufford

 

Three Summers by Karen Swan

Tricase Porto, Puglia, Italy.

1957: The summer of innocence.
Amongst the lemon trees, Rafaella Parisi impatiently waits for the summer visitors to arrive in her small fishing village on the coast of Puglia. She may be dating Fon Giannelli, but there is one person she longs to see: Cosimo – son of the wealthy Franchetti family.

1958: The summer everything changes.
After a devastating accident at the lavish Franchetti villa, Rafa makes a vow that changes the course of all their futures.

1961: The summer they meet again.
When Rafa and Cosi’s worlds collide, Rafa faces an agonising choice. Is she willing to risk the life she has for the future she once dreamed of?

Available to buy here
Connect with Karen Swan

 

The Halifax Hellions by Alexandra Vasti

Secret identities. Salacious engravings. And a scandalous Regency road trip…

From the day of their debut, when Matilda smoked a cigar and Margo tied a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue, the Halifax twins have flouted convention at every turn. But when Matilda runs off with the dangerous Marquess of Ashford she may finally have gone too far.

Determined to stop her sister’s inexplicable elopement, Margo turns to her oldest friend for help: because if anyone can get her to Scotland in time, it’s starchy solicitor Henry Mortimer. Beneath his buttoned-up exterior, Henry is ardently, wildly, miserably in love with Margo. And Matilda and Ashford’s relationship, too, may not be quite what it seems…

With the Halifax Hellions at the reins of this carriage, what could possibly go wrong?

Available to buy here
Connect with Alexandra Vasti

 

Murder At The Duomo by T.A. Williams

Even angels can have a dark side…

As the sticky heat of August settles over Florence, Dan Armstrong is ready for a well-earned break; sightseeing with fiancée Anna, daughter Tricia and her fiancé Shaun. But when a British man is found dead inside the city’s magnificent Duomo, Dan’s plans quickly change.

The victim, Tristan Angel, is a super-wealthy arms dealer with a saintly name and a devilish reputation. But what was he doing in the cathedral, and who decided to make it his final confession?

At Angel’s opulent villa in the hills of Fiesole, Dan and Commissario Virgilio encounter a colourful cast of suspects – each one hiding secrets and none too eager to talk. As tempers rise and the heat outside grows ever more intense, Dan and his four-legged sidekick, Oscar, must sniff out the truth before the killer strikes again.

Available to buy here
Connect with T.A. Williams

 

Light Year by Jennifer Wong

Light Year by Jennifer Wong is a meditation on time.

These poems delve into the mind of a poet crossing spaces of deep wounds, love and healing: a constellation of friendships and love as she moves through upheaval, transformation and change.

The collection offers glimpses into the journeys of a migrant, a daughter and a mother; with the passage of years, the poems ask what it might mean to move like light itself, beyond expectations and into new ways of understanding ourselves more profoundly.

With sublime precision, Jennifer Wong’s poetry brings clarity to the spaces between the stars – the time difference between memories and place, between our loved ones and everything we hold dear in life.

Available to buy here
Connect with Jennifer Wong

 

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 27 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.

We want to help connect authors and readers, so our Saturday Spotlight page showcases some of the exciting new reads available each month.