Saturday Spotlight: New Book Releases May 2026

30 May 2026
News, Saturday Spotlight

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.

*****

At Sea by Y.M. Abdel-Magied

Being one of the boys was one thing. Being the boss of the boys was something else altogether.

Expert driller Zainab is called to take charge of a high-stakes oil rig operation. Unable to resist the opportunity, she leaves behind her pregnant sister and heads offshore for the job of her life. But there’s a catch. The rig is teetering on the edge of disaster and Zainab is the only woman amongst a crew of hardened men who want absolutely nothing to do with her.

At the helm but forced to prove herself at every turn, Zainab labours to investigate the rig’s imminent collapse. She quickly grasps that the real danger lies in the cold calculations and base desires of the men she is forced to spend every waking moment with.

As tensions rise and secrets unravel, Zainab races to uncover the truth bubbling below and fend off the looming catastrophe. Explosive and thought-provoking, At Sea is an exhilarating story about the clash of ambition, principle and prejudice and the unexpected consequences of our choices.

Available to buy here
Connect with Y.M. Abdel-Magied

The Lowe Job by Grace Alexander

“You don’t want to go down in history as his mistake, darling.
You want him to go down as yours.”

When Lili Lowe is caught in a compromising position with her boss, married politician Teddy Landen, she suddenly finds herself thrust into the centre of a media frenzy.

She turns, as most daughters would, to her mother. Yet Lydia Lowe is a former talent agent, and it’s not long before the whole world knows the name Lili Lowe.

As the spotlight brightens on Lili, and her three sisters Stevie, Iris and Katie, the women’s lives are changed in ways they could never have predicted.

And it’s soon clear that fame, and fortune, comes with a price…

Available to buy here
Connect with Grace Alexander

The Cut by Richard Armitage

Ben Knott has it all: perfect family, impressive career, beautiful home near where he grew up.

His son is even going to star in a Hollywood movie, filmed right here in the village.

Then Ben starts to recognise the film’s storyline – from his own past. The characters, settings and details all mirror the death of his school friend 30 years ago and as his son is being asked to take more and more risks during filming, Ben gets suspicious. What’s really behind this film project?

How much is Ben willing to risk to protect his family?

Available to buy here
Connect with Richard Armitage

Desperate Measures by Kerry Barnes

The girls who escaped Laxville Children’s Home carry scars that never healed. The Menzies took them in as family and made one promise: no one would ever hurt them again.

But what happens if that promise cannot be fulfilled?

Because not every man paid for what they did.

Lord Haroldson was one of them. Now, he must resort to desperate measures to keep the past buried.

Jeanie Menzie, daughter of the notorious Vic Menzie, has been handed The Opal Club. She carries more than her fair share of demons, but she’s not about to let everything fall apart.

So, when a Laxville girl is brutally murdered and dumped outside her club, it becomes personal.

This isn’t random…

To protect his secrets, Haroldson makes one call, unleashing a greedy, ruthless man with his own plans for what comes next.

But Jeanie is her father’s daughter. Touch her club or her family and you’re not walking away.

Loyalty forged. Vengeance unleashed. Blood demanded.

Available to buy here
Connect with Kerry Barnes

The Country House Dining Room by Amy Boyington

Combining architectural, social and cultural history to explore the significance of the Country House Dining Room during the Georgian era.

The country house dining room was an elaborate theatre for Georgian elites to entertain their guests and, more importantly, show off their wealth, power and social status. Every detail was carefully orchestrated, usually by the lady of the house, from the decor and tableware to the food and drink served.

Decorated with fine art, antique sculptures and lavish furnishings, the dining room was governed by strict dining etiquette and social rituals. It was expected for guests to eat and drink to excess, so it is perhaps unsurprising that in the Georgian era we see the development of supposed miracle cures for obesity, alcoholism and related illnesses.

Drawing on previously unpublished contemporary accounts of feasts at Holkham Hall, Hardwick Hall and Blenheim Palace, among others, Amy Boyington brings the Georgian dining experience to life and charts how the dining room encapsulated the intricate cultural and political dynamics of the 18th century.

Available to buy here
Connect with Amy Boyington

Familiar by Bethany Joy Dawson

When Cora inherits a house in rural County Down from a grandmother she never knew, she steps into a family history shaped by absence, silence and restraint.

Ballybrae House is both shelter and a place of renewal, holding the imprints of those who came before and the hope of something new.

Told through the shifting perspectives of three women across generations, Familiar follows Annie as she approaches death and discovers unexpected freedom in letting go, Joyce, her daughter, almost mute with grief, who finds liberation in Cora’s arrival and Cora, who must learn to inhabit a place – and a past – that was deliberately withheld from her, finding the courage to begin again.

Familiar is a story about belonging and the uneasy intimacy of family, asking what it means to survive within inherited structures and how, at moments of rupture, those structures might be remade.

Available to buy here
Connect with Bethany Joy Dawson

The Perfect Matcha by Stevie Greene

Will love brew in Honey Springs?

Willow Davis has everything she should want: an impressive corporate job, a beautiful Seattle apartment and an even more beautiful boyfriend to go alongside it. But when a quarter-life crisis hits and everything begins to fall apart, there’s only one place she wants to go. Up to the mountains and to the small town of Honey Springs, where she’s determined to lean into self-care and bring her love of matcha lattes with her.

Lucas Dawson is still running his family business. The grumpy, gritty and gorgeous diner owner’s heart seems impenetrable, even when Willow, his warm-as-sunshine childhood best friend, returns to town.

But what is Lucas hiding… and why can Willow feel their bond stirring up more than just old memories?

Available to buy here
Connect with Stevie Greene

The Midnight Train by Matt Haig

When your life flashes before your eyes, what will matter most?

For Wilbur it was his time with Maggie, the love of his life. Their honeymoon in Venice. Before he threw it all away.

Years later, on the brink of his own death, a train arrives. It can take Wilbur back in time. To relive his most important moments. Soon he realises just how much he would have changed.

An adventure through time, The Midnight Train is a story of love and second chances, from the world of The Midnight Library.

Available to buy here
Connect with Matt Haig

Road Trip To The Riviera by Gillian Harvey

When Sarah breaks her leg, her only thought is how on earth she’ll get to the south of France for her beloved son’s wedding. She’s been told not to fly, and the train route involves many changes – not ideal when you can barely walk.

There’s only one person she can turn to. Her son’s father, Hal. The pair were teenage sweethearts when Sarah fell pregnant, and he’s always been in his son’s life. Only his parenting style is more ‘fun uncle’ than serious dad; all the ‘proper parenting’ has been left to Sarah. He’s oblivious. She’s furious.

But she’s out of options. And Hal is happy to drive her, with one proviso: they’re taking the scenic route, in his battered VW camper van.

Now, two people – whose lives have only been intertwined through their child for more than 20 years – are about to find out there is far more of a journey ahead for them than either could possibly anticipate…

Available to buy here
Connect with Gillian Harvey

Sparky: My Barn Owl by Tracey Iceton

Hatched in the UK in August 2017, Sparky is a captive-bred barn owl.

Raised by humans, living with them, she accepts them as essential to her life, benefiting from the security they can provide, but suffering under the uncertainty they can inflict. And here, thanks to her current human, t-raay-cee, Sparky recounts her unique story.

By turns heart-warming and disturbing, Sparky offers an owl’s-eye view of her relationship with her human mates and her search for a special human to bond with lifelong.

A mesmerising and ambitious work that crosses genres and raises important questions about how we can connect deeply with the more-than-human world.

Available to buy here

Murder At The Spirit Lounge by Jess Kidd

Sharp-eyed former nun Nora Breen is back, as the latest attraction in Gore-on-Sea turns deadly…

On a brilliant December morning, Nora finds her customary seaside walk rudely interrupted: she’s been summoned, with Detective Inspector Rideout, to the home of Doreen Chimes, Gore-on-Sea’s resident Medium. Chimes would like to report a robbery and to personally invite Rideout to that evening’s private séance.

It’s an invitation he will regret accepting: the evening ends in a suspiciously spooky murder. And in the coming days, more of the attendees will find themselves in peril. Can Nora figure out who – or what – is behind these spectral killings before it’s too late?

Available to buy here
Connect with Jess Kidd

Lost London by Paul Knox

An engaging, beautifully illustrated history of London told through 25 lost buildings.

London has been rebuilt and reshaped perhaps more than any other city over its two-millennia history. From the construction of the Underground to slum clearance and the Blitz, buildings have long been damaged or demolished to pave way for the new. Today, demolition is big business and around 3500 buildings are destroyed each year, most of which are social housing.

Paul Knox traces the history of London from the Great Fire to the present day through 25 lost buildings. He explores surprising and unusual locations in the city’s history, such as the Necropolis Station in Waterloo used by funeral parties traveling to a burial ground in Surrey. We see historic landmarks – Christ Church Greyfriars and Crystal Palace, for example – as well as everyday places: the White Horse pub in Poplar and a housing estate in Hackney.

This is a fascinating study of London’s restless landscape, showing how conservation has changed over 400 years.

Available to buy here

The Masquerade: A History Of Extravagance And Intrigue by Meghan Kobza

The first full history of an extraordinary 18th century British entertainment.

Glittering masquerades, held at the most fashionable London venues, dominated the calendars of the Georgian elite. A thrilling opportunity to gather, flirt and consume, hosts such as ‘Empress of Pleasure’ Teresa Cornelys welcomed the great and the good in elaborate costumes: including bear suits, harlequin outfits or, in the case of Elizabeth Chudleigh, very little at all. The masquerade was a place of make-believe and revelry – a party like no other.

Kobza invites us into these dazzling gatherings, showing how they became a wider cultural obsession. Organised by wealthy impresarios, the masquerade allowed the aristocracy to flaunt their status and enjoy themselves behind the closed doors of opulent ballrooms, theatres and gardens, dressed by an industry of ever more inventive habit-makers. For the rest of society, the masquerade was notorious for mischief and misbehaviour; a focus for voracious gossip.

Lavishly illustrated, full of life and originality, The Masquerade is a revelatory account of an event which captivates us to this day.

Available to buy here

Smallie by Eden McKenzie-Goddard

Smallie adj. |smal·lie|. Definition: Caribbean (informal). Describing or relating a person from a small island; a small islander.

In 1961, 19-year-old Lucinda Brown travels to England in search of her son’s father, Clarence Braithwaite, who left Barbados to join the British army. But aboard the ship to Southampton she meets a man named Raldo who offers her a glimpse of a new, freer life. Bound by the memory of her son waiting at home, she chooses Clarence – realising too late that war has made a stranger out of him.

Nearly 50 years later, Lucinda receives a letter from the Home Office that threatens to tear her world apart. Her children rally together to prove her legal arrival. To do so they must track down an elusive man from her past, a man she wanted to love but instead lost, a man who now holds the key to her family’s future: Raldo.

An exhilarating and expansive tale of a family thrown into collision with the Windrush scandal, Smallie shows just how easily the past can spill into our lives, even when – especially when – we think we’ve closed the door on it.

Available to buy here
Connect with Eden McKenzie-Goddard

Such A Nice Girl by Andrea Mara

Have you seen the girls?

The morning after a glamorous, luxury wedding, best friends Siobhan and Grace go to wake their 24-year-old daughters. Opening the door to their shared room, they find a smashed lamp, an abandoned phone and blood on the carpet.

Over the next few days, the truth unravels, testing Siobhan and Grace’s friendship to its limits. As secrets and lies begin to come to light, they realise that the girls were not best friends. In fact, they weren’t really friends at all. And now, it looks as though one of them is dead. And one of them is a killer.

But whose daughter is guilty of murder?

Available to buy here
Connect with Andrea Mara

What We Ask Google by Simon Rogers

Ever wondered what goes through other people’s minds: our silly questions, inner anxieties, hopes and dreams?

In this hopeful and insightful book, Google Data Editor Simon Rogers explores insights from the world’s biggest dataset: an epic snapshot, two decades long and counting, of our collective brain. What it reveals about us might surprise you.

In June the UK sees a spike in searches for ‘how to help a bee’
London is the top place on earth searching for ‘tell the time drunk’
Around the world, it’s two am when parents want to know how to get their baby to sleep
Searches for ‘how to help’ are at an all-time high

Brimming with insights varying from the playful to the profound, What We Ask Google delves into the momentous and the mundane secrets of what we ask when we get the chance to ask anything, offering a surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind.

Available to buy here

Her Rising Star by Rachel Sargeant

DI Steph Lewis comes under an unforgiving media spotlight in this twisty locked room mystery, where murder is committed live on air.

While attending a police conference at Cheltenham Town Hall, Steph is summoned to a nearby film studio. A chat show panellist has collapsed during a live broadcast.

At the scene, Steph discovers the man sprawled on the floor. The livestream is still running, other panellists are horrified and the studio is in chaos. Is the death accidental, the result of a severe allergy, or is there more to the fatality than meets the eye?

Despite intrusive press interest in the case, Steph must investigate her suspects: the producer, the studio runner, the cameraman and the diverse cast of panellists.

Nothing about this on-screen death adds up.

Is just one of them a murderer? Or do they all have something to hide?

Available to buy here
Connect with Rachel Sargeant

The Calamity Club by Kathyrn Stockett

“You give a girl a taste of fresh air and then you take it away ― she’ll grow fierce and wild to get it back.”

Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.

Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one.

Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the ‘unadoptable’ girls at the town’s orphanage, where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed.

When she meets Birdie, a young woman who has come to Oxford determined to remind her socialite sister of the impoverished family she left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems as though someone else might care about Meg’s future.

But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie begins to suspect her sister’s charmed life may be founded on a tapestry of lies. Then Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose.

Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women.

But in a town steeped in hypocrisy, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.

Bold, heartwarming and riotously funny, The Calamity Club is an unforgettable story of resilience and friendship and a sisterhood of underestimated women who risk everything to take back control of their fates.

Available to buy here
Connect with Kathryn Stockett

The Boleyn Secret by Alison Weir

A BOLEYN WOMAN IS NO STRANGER TO SECRETS…

At 12 years old, Kate Carey attends her aunt, Queen Anne Boleyn, to the scaffold. Horrified by what she witnesses, Kate is convinced King Henry VIII has sent an innocent woman to a terrible death.

As the Boleyns fall from favour, Kate serves her now motherless cousin, the young Lady Elizabeth. Bound by Boleyn blood, the two girls are like sisters, until Kate marries for love – and leaves a jealous Elizabeth behind.

At court, Kate cannot ignore the sly looks thrown her way, nor the whispers behind her back. Only when her mother, Mary, lies dying, does she learn the life-shattering truth that the Boleyns have been hiding for years.

It is a secret that will haunt Kate throughout her life, as her family flee into exile, only returning home when Elizabeth becomes Queen. But the bond between the Boleyn cousins will never be the same again…

Available to buy here
Connect with Alison Weir

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.

Saturday Spotlight: New Book Releases May 2026

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

Tag :

Related News