Saturday Spotlight: New Book Releases April 2026
- 25 April 2026
- News, Saturday Spotlight
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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The Woman In The Wall by Heidi Amsinck
Available to buy here
Connect with Heidi Amsinck
Like A Cat Loves A Bird by James Bailey
She was, if you believe what you read in the papers: a genius, a survivor, a bad mother, a fickle friend, a closeted lesbian, a tyrant, a loner, an eccentric, a recluse, a gossip, and an arch-manipulator. She would politely encourage you not to believe what you read in the papers.
Muriel Spark was one of literature’s great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels – with their plots featuring pensioners receiving telephone calls from Death, the devil going clubbing in Peckham and a fascist schoolmistress leading her coterie of girls astray – but it is also true of her as a person.
As sly, nimble and elegant as Spark’s own work, Like A Cat Loves A Bird is a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much of the twentieth century. From her childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany – via South Africa, London, New York and Rome – it traces a light-footed journey around the world and through her strange and magnificent bibliography. It tells an irresistible story of transformation, wit and fierce determination and makes a passionate case for this vital modern artist.
Available to buy here
Connect with James Bailey
Talking Classics: The Shock Of The Old by Professor Mary Beard
Available to buy here
Connect with Professor Mary Beard
Upwood Bound by Woody Brown
At the heart of Upward Bound is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us.
Among the college’s clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide who lost his mother as a boy, and Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape despite Carlos’s best efforts. Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, pines for Ann, the lifeguard for the summer who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, the centre’s director. He wanted to be an actor, but finds himself on a very different path.
With his wit, empathy and astonishing gifts as a storyteller, Woody Brown immerses us in life as we have never experienced it before.
My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive…
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle, and her followers are sick with envy. Her charming farmhouse on her working ranch is artfully cluttered, her husband is a handsome cowboy, her homemade sourdough boules are each more beautiful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers and industrial-grade ovens behind the scenes? What her followers don’t know won’t hurt them.
Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up in a strange, horrible version of reality. Her home, her husband, her children―they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Is this a hoax? A reality show? A test from God? Natalie knows just two things for sure: this isn’t her perfect life, and she must escape, by any means possible.
As darkly funny as it is shocking and gripping, Yesteryear is an electrifying examination of tradition, fame, faith and the grand performance of womanhood, from a thrilling new talent in fiction.
Available to buy here
Connect with Caro Claire Burke
The Story of Printmaking by Holly EJ Black
A vivid history of the evolution of printmaking as a means of creative expression, from prehistory to the present day.
The significance of printmaking within the history of art is often underplayed, obscured or misunderstood. This book tells the story of artist prints from across the globe in a manner that is accessible and engaging. It demystifies how prints are made – from woodblock to etching – and explores how, throughout history, printmaking has defied easy categorisation, straddling ‘fine’ art practices and commercially minded production. In fact, it has been employed as much for creative experimentation as it has for disseminating information.
Beginning in ancient East Asia and travelling through Renaissance Europe, revolutionary Mexico and post-Apartheid South Africa, these ten chapters celebrate the interconnected nature of the printed image and its multiple histories, while illuminating the lesser-known players who have been deliberately or erroneously overlooked. Whether formed by slicing linoleum or plunging plates into acid, then distributed via bound books or pasted posters, the print has not just replicated the world, it has shaped it.
Available to buy here
Connect with Holly EJ Black
A Quick Reads story from the bestselling author of The Rag Princess.
Charity has always lived a charmed life beneath the open skies. Growing up as part of the Gypsy community, she has revelled in the freedom of swimming in the rivers, caring for the horses and embracing the ever-changing road. But on the cusp of her 16th birthday, that freedom begins to slip away. Her parents expect her to marry, and not for love, but for duty.
Then fate brings Luca back into her life – a boy from the travelling circus she has known since childhood. Only now, with eyes opened by the first stirrings of passion, Charity sees Luca as more than a friend. In Luca’s laughter and quiet strength, she finds the promise of a love so fierce it feels destined. But their bond is forbidden. Two different communities. Two worlds that cannot unite.
Refusing to surrender their hearts, Charity and Luca dare to dream of escape and come up with a plan: Charity will run away first and he will follow. But with one mistake and one cruel twist of fate their dreams are shattered. Now torn between her love for Luca and overcoming a betrayal, Charity must fight for the life she longs for. Will destiny reunite the star-crossed lovers, or has she lost him forever?
If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art Of Shakespeare In Translation by Daniel Hahn
Why might Hamlet be even longer in Italian?
How does the story of Romeo And Juliet begin… in Thai?
How do you build a joke in German, or recreate a rhyme in Japanese?
And why are Lady Macbeth’s pronouns such a problem?
What does it mean to translate Shakespeare? When we change all the poetry, all the wordplay, all the syntax – all the words! – is it still Shakespeare? And is it still any good?
Daniel Hahn, seasoned translator and Shakespeare fanatic, will change the way you think about language itself. Ranging widely across Shakespeare’s works, and across the world’s languages, this book explores why we choose the words we do and what effect they have.
No knowledge of any particular language is required, though a bit of patience for the nerdiest of close reading is desirable. This micro-attention to detail reveals anew the joy of Shakespeare, celebrates creativity and revels in the power of words.
Son Of Nobdy by Yann Martel
The past is never done with: always the song continues
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.
In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilisation itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.
As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its modern footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition and grief.
In this masterpiece of myth and history, Son Of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live – then, now and always.
A road trip across America with her teenage daughter was meant to be much-needed bonding time for Simone before Lucy leaves home for university.
But on the first night of their stay, in a cabin deep in the Texan desert, Simone wakes to find Lucy missing and a mobile phone in her place. The phone rings and the voice on the other end issues instructions: Don’t tell the police. Come to this location. Be prepared to do a deal.”
There is nothing Simone wouldn’t do to save her daughter. Hide the truth. Commit a terrible crime. Become a wanted woman.
But this is no ordinary kidnap and ransom. Getting Lucy back is just the beginning.
Available to buy here
Connect with Gillian McAllister
The Name Game by Beth O’Leary
The Isle of Ormer: population 500, soon to be 501.
Charlie Jones has landed on the island to embark on her brand new life. As the manager at Ormer’s only farm shop, this job will be her perfect next chapter. Good riddance to the mainland, this is it: fresh air, and a clean slate.
Except there is one small issue . . .
Charlie Jones has also just arrived on the Isle of Ormer, to embark on his brand new life. His job at the farm shop feels like fate, and could not have come at a better moment. On Ormer, Charlie has promised himself he’ll escape old friends, bad habits and heartbreak.
This second chance is the best thing that could have happened to Charlie . . . and Charlie.
That is, until they are introduced . . .
Go Gentle by Maria Semple
Adora Hazzard has it all figured out.
A contented divorcée, she relishes her teenage daughter, her job as a moral tutor for an old-money family and the bliss of finally being solo.
Alone but far from lonely, she’s also quietly assembling a ‘coven’ of like-minded single women on the sixth floor of the legendary Ansonia building on New York’s Upper West Side. Together, they share groceries, dog walkers – and one dirty little secret: despite their age, they’re only just getting started.
Adora’s life philosophy is simple: want only what you already have. But could a chance encounter with a charming stranger threaten her joyfully curated life and leave Adora suddenly wanting more – even if she must risk everything to get it?
Available to buy here
Connect with Maria Semple
Five Silver Spoons by Sam Steele
One down.
When a suspected overdose victim is found to have received a postcard marked You’re first, DI Hope Fenton uncovers links to a circle of privileged Cambridge alumni: an eco-entrepreneur, a surgeon, a lecturer, and a government minister. They have been bound together since a fateful night 20 years ago, but are they potential victims – or suspects?
Four to go.
As the body count rises – seemingly the clique is being picked off one by one – Hope fails to cope with the terrible shadow cast by the disappearance of her son Noah eight years ago. The unanswered questions of what happened to him also haunt her ex-husband, colleague, and forensic scientist Dr Adam Fenton. But could it be that this case holds the key to Noah’s disappearance?
Available to buy here
Connect with Sam Steele
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.
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