Saturday Spotlight: New Book Releases September 2026
- 26 September 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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Not A Word by Linwood Barclay
Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong person?
Every family has secrets, but when Reece visits his parents’ house, he’s shocked to find them in bed, dead. At first glance it looks like a murder-suicide perpetrated by his father, but on closer inspection there’s clearly more to the story. For starters, inconsistencies in the crime scene suggest his dad may not have shot himself.
As Reece, shaken by his horrifying discovery, awaits questioning from the police, his phone lights up with a call. It’s the last person he ever would have expected to hear from.
Reeling from the day’s events, Reece finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about his parents – and whether he and his own family are in danger now. While the authorities work to untangle the baffling crime scene, Reece is pulled into a web of secrets linked to the unscrupulous pharma company his father worked for years ago.
In order to protect the people he loves most, he’ll have to dig deep into his own past to understand who his parents were, what they did, and who they hurt – before he ends up paying for their sins.
Available to buy here
Connect with Linwood Barclay
The Last Library Of Paris by Kerry Barrett
In the heart of Paris, one library refuses to close its doors…
1941. As the city’s shopfronts go dark and war rages across Europe, Frances Reed is determined to keep her library open. Delivering books to those who need them most, she knows stories are more than just words – they can save lives.
Meanwhile, Cassie Watkins arranges safe passage for those with nowhere else to turn. When a parcel of books connects Frances and Cassie’s worlds, they form a fragile network of readers, helpers and secrets.
But someone else is reading between the lines too, and discovery could cost them everything. How far will Frances and Cassie go to keep stories alive?
Available to buy here
Connect with Kerry Barrett
Under Story by Chloe Benjamin
At an isolated research station in Antarctica, biologist Laurel Salter washes dishes for a living ten hours a day, six days a week. She tells no one why she left her career, or why her marriage ended.
But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo, her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind.
Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them: to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
And this time, live it differently.
Once read, never forgotten, Under Story is a genre-defying exploration of the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love.
Available to buy here
Connect with Chloe Benjamin
Keep The Home Fires Burning by S. Block
Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison
A reaper and an angel walk into a bar…
Darcy Moore is tired of death. Which would be fine – if she wasn’t the Grim Reaper.
Gabriel Aetos is determined to protect his little corner of the world like his angel wings depend on it.
When Darcy shows up to Gabriel’s faded old bar, she is hell-bent on outrunning her reputation as a villain. She won’t be dragging her next assignment to the underworld. She’ll be saving him instead.
But Gabriel is convinced that Darcy is as deadly as it gets. And if protecting his people means staying close – very close – to this rogue reaper, then that’s exactly what he’ll do.
Only, magic never comes without consequences and these two spirits may just be forced to reap what they sow.
Available to buy here
Connect with B.K. Borisov
Someone Just Followed You by Liane Child
Maple Clark goes missing.
Maple Clark is like many teenage girls. She’s awkward around boys and feels misunderstood by her parents. But she’s also an internet sensation with a huge income and a mum who is driven to do whatever it takes to make her more famous. She’s constantly creating content for her millions of followers. Until the day the content stops.
Maple Clark has vanished.
And there are 1.9 million suspects.
Anyone could have followed her. Only one person knows where she is.
Available to buy here
Connect with Liane Child
The definitive visual record of the clandestine work carried out by the British Security Service, MI5, from its origins to the modern day.
Authors Mark Dunton, Principal Records Specialist at The National Archives, and Stephen Twigge, a former Head of Modern Collections at The National Archives, have had unparalleled access to the archives. Detailing uprisings and executions, double agents and femmes fatales from across the globe, The MI5 Archive presents a window into the world of spycraft that has kept British democracy safe.
Regnum Defende: Defend the Realm. MI5, the intelligence agency responsible for protecting the UK against threats to national security, has acted under this motto since it was founded in 1909. This has involved the management of secrets over the decades: secrets for which vast swathes of information are now declassified.
Within, you will find source material on the Siege of Sidney Street, the Cambridge Spy Ring and the Profumo Affair, and never-before-published imagery prepared exclusively for this book and The National Archives’ popular 2025 exhibition ‘MI5: Official Secrets.’
From interrogations to surveillance logs, coded messages to intercepted phone calls, The MI5 Archive charts the clandestine activities of MI5 right from its inception.
Available to buy here
Connect with Mark Dunton
Murder At The Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley
High in the Swiss Alps, with glorious mountain views and exclusive access to powdery slopes, the Grand Alpine Hotel draws guests from far and wide.
The notorious actress.
The high-flying politician.
The inscrutable political wife.
The reckless friend.
The shrewd doctor.
When a guest enters a gondola alive, only to be found dead at the top of the mountain, it’s clear there’s a killer in their midst.
As tensions rise and old grudges emerge like cracks in the ice, someone watches from the shadows. An unassuming woman with an extraordinary mind: Miss Marple.
She suspects everyone in the hotel, and she’s right to. For it isn’t just a question of who has a motive, but who’s next…
Available to buy here
Connect with Lucy Foley
The Winter Bride by Rosie Goodwin
Nuneaton, 1922.
After a difficult childhood in the workhouse, never knowing her real family and the horrors of the battlefields of the First World War, Annie has finally found her place in the world. With a thriving business, the love of her adopted family and a kind, generous fiancé in Monty, her future seems secure. Yet her heart cannot forget the questions that linger from her past – or the memory of Alex Gordon, the only man she has ever truly loved.
When long-buried secrets rise to the surface, Annie’s carefully built world begins to crumble. Alone once more, she seizes her chance for a fresh start in London, determined to turn her talents into a flourishing new dress shop. Yet the past refuses to be silenced, and fate has one final twist in store: Alex’s return. Torn between the safety of what she has built and the dangerous pull of the love she’s never forgotten, Annie must decide where her true future lies. Will she finally find the answers she has been searching for – and the love she has always yearned for – or will heartbreak find her once more?
Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in their small Irish hometown in 1982.
Brilliant, sharp-tongued and born to slip through the cracks, Red’s reputation for trouble precedes him – but Róisín finds herself swept up in his storm and soon their connection deepens.
When a brush with the law pushes Red into a corner, he escapes their town to start a new life in England. As the years pass, they remain tethered to one another, a fragile thread holding their once fierce friendship together. When Róisín arrives in London, the promise of freedom, of reinvention and of finding her dear friend calls.
But searching for Red leads Róisín to a truth darker than she could have imagined: when you go looking for someone you may uncover parts of yourself along the way that you’d rather stayed buried. And Red – bright, beautiful Red – might not want to be found at all.
Available to buy here
Connect with Louise Kennedy
Still, I Opened by Anele Malgas
Still, I Opened is a collection of poems moving through love, desire, heartbreak and healing — not as separate experiences, but as parts of the same story.
These poems are for those who feel deeply, even when the words don’t always come. For those who love fully, crave honestly and carry emotions that often go unseen.
Within these pages, love is soft and consuming. Desire is unfiltered and imagined without shame. Heartbreak is heavy, honest and familiar. And healing does not arrive all at once — it comes slowly, in quiet moments, in choosing to continue, in learning how to sit with what you feel.
This book doesn’t try to fix you. It meets you where you are — inviting you to remember, to feel, to question and to begin again.
Maisie Baxter finally has it all.
She’s killing it at work, literally, her friendships have never been stronger and, best of all, there’s gorgeous new boyfriend Will. After overthrowing a global conspiracy together, they’re well and truly in the honeymoon phase.
So why can’t she shake the feeling she’s doing everything wrong?
When a routine gig leads to an infamous crime organisation, Maisie finds herself drawn into a complex web of jealousy, betrayal and secrets. As unexpected figures from her – and Will’s – past resurface, Maisie must decide who she can trust to protect the ones she loves…
Available to buy here
Connect with Elsie Marks
Elderwood by R.E. McAuliffe
Ireland, 1995.
To her annoyance, 15-year-old Aoife is whisked away by her mother Maggie to spend the summer in Elderwood, a remote manor owned by the Anglo-Irish Stafford family. Worse still, Maggie reveals that she has separated from Aoife’s father. Aoife’s only consolation is her budding friendship with Niamh, the housekeeper’s wayward granddaughter. Niamh leads Aoife into a maze of thrills, drugs, secrets and betrayals – and at its heart lies the curse of Elderwood. Pitting themselves against adult authority, the girls lose control of the evil they unleash.
Twenty-five years later, Maggie’s death brings Aoife back to the Staffords. As she finds herself lured into a world she thought she’d left behind, she’s forced to face the question she’s spent her life avoiding: just what is the curse of Elderwood, and can she break it?
A Bigger Life by Louise O’Neill
What happens when you stop trying to be the woman everyone wants you to be and start asking what you want instead?
At 38, Louise O’Neill had the life she thought she wanted. The relationship. The home. The future. Then it all ended, taking with it not only the life she had built, but her certainty about what a successful, happy life was supposed to look like.
Heartbroken but restless, Louise decided not to rebuild the same life all over again. Inspired by her father’s advice to go out and live a bigger life, she began saying yes. To risk. To desire. To adventure. To the possibility that there might be another way to live.
What followed was an extraordinary dating odyssey across Paris, London and New York, meeting a different man each night. The stories are outrageous, intimate and frequently hilarious, but the men are only the beginning.
Because as Louise steps outside the life she thought she was supposed to want, she begins to question the rules that got her there in the first place. Why are women still taught to make themselves smaller, easier and more pliable to be loved? Why are we so frightened of ageing? How do we measure success when marriage and motherhood are no longer inevitable milestones? What has modern dating done to intimacy? And what does it mean to desire men at a moment when masculinity itself feels increasingly contested?
Turning her trademark sharp, fearless eye on ageing, beauty, sex, motherhood, modern masculinity, loneliness, ambition and the pressure to settle, Louise examines the contradictions of being a woman today while implicating herself in every one of them.
The Seaside Supper Club by Caroline Roberts
Could a taste of love mend two broken hearts?
In the enchanting Northumberland village of Tilldale, Cath is flourishing. Amongst food with friends, evenings in a rickety hut by the sea and a blossoming romance with Will, she’s built a life worth cherishing. But when heart-wrenching news threatens to upend their new-found happiness, Cath and Will must learn how to navigate the uncharted waters of love and family together.
With their supper club friends more determined than ever to bring joy back to their village, the community teams up to stage a vintage afternoon tea. As their journey of healing and hope begins, will tea and scones bring everyone together? And will Cath and Will learn to get by with a little help from their friends?
Available to buy here
Connect with Caroline Roberts
The Paradise Heights Miniature Railway Bust-Up by Kate Solly
Something is amiss at the Paradise Heights Miniature Railway.
And this suits Fleck Parker just fine – she’s on the hunt for a new puzzle to solve. Expensive equipment and supplies have disappeared and nobody knows why. Who could possibly wish harm on a community group delivering Sunday afternoon fun on a fleet of jolly little engines?
Fleck is frenetic as ever as she feeds a hungry baby, placates a cranky toddler, executes an (almost) on-time school run and investigates crime – all without losing her Wordle streak. Meanwhile, her best friend, Trixie, is scrambling to manage the Many Hands Society Craft Shop, where volatile volunteers are becoming a real problem.
Fleck has never met a puzzle she didn’t want to solve and this one is just the ticket. Nobody suspects the cheerful mum asking questions at the railway as she tries to untangle the conundrum. But idyllic bushland and miniature villages hide a sinister mystery, darker and more complex than anyone imagined. Will Fleck’s attempts to derail the thief land her on the wrong side of the tracks?
Available to buy here
Connect with Kate Solly
Sniff: A History Of Smells by William Tullett
A remarkable account of the weird and wonderful history of smell.
Across vast periods of time and around the globe, smell has been central to human life. From the incense burned in medieval religious rituals to the use of modern sniffer dogs, smells have been central to our sense of identity, our ability to build communities and, perhaps less positively, to mark those deemed unwelcome within them. Our sense of smell brings us the pleasure of good food, wine and perfume – but it also warns us of dangerous fire, gas and rot.
What did the past smell like? Why does our own world smell the way it does?
Moving through key locations, from libraries to forests, churches to hospitals, William Tullett explores the peculiar history of smell. We smell witchcraft and murder, fin de siècle Parisian theatres and cinemas in 1960s New York. What emerges is not just a history of smells, but biographies of the many noses that have sniffed them.
Available to buy here
Connect with William Tullett
Sisters Of The Midnight Sun by Fiona Valpy
Two women, decades apart, are torn apart by grief but brought together through hope.
Shetland, 2001: Ruby Reid is running from a decision she doesn’t want to make. Finding herself on a remote croft caring for a mysterious old woman, she discovers Hanna has her own reasons for hiding from the world.
Slowly, Hanna reveals her story to Ruby.
Norway, 1940: Hanna Kristiansen’s world is overturned when Norway falls into the hands of Germany. She’s determined to keep her twin sister, Liv, safe but, as Hanna fights for her country, she must make unthinkable personal sacrifices. The war may take everything from her, but ensuring the freedom of her people demands it.
Decades later, Hanna is still haunted by the scars of war that mark her arm. The numbers that will forever signify where one life ended and another began.
But as the two women bond through their shared loss, they learn to find strength in fragility and discover new hope in the most unlikely of places.
Available to buy here
Connect with Fiona Valpy
The Wicked Girls by Roz Watkins
In the Cornish village of Peneerie, a tragedy is unfolding.
Girls are dying on their 17th birthdays and no one can explain why. Some say it’s a curse; others a psychological phenomenon known as suicide contagion. What Kat knows is her daughter Ruby’s birthday is fast approaching.
A CURSE AWOKEN
Villagers talk anxiously of Eliza, a serving girl in the local manor house who took her own life on her 17th birthday nearly two hundred years ago. She cursed the girls of the village to never see womanhood.
A MOTHER PREPARED TO DO ANYTHING
Kat is determined Ruby won’t be the next to die. As she races to unravel Eliza’s Curse, she’ll have to confront the ghosts of the past and shocking truths about the world she lives in. But how far will she go to protect her daughter? And what will it cost to break the cycle of tragedy before it’s too late?
Available to buy here
Connect to Roz Watkins
Music To Die For At The Seaview Hotel by Glenda Young
Eighties pop band The A64 are reuniting for the gig of a lifetime at Scarborough’s Open Air Theatre, and Helen Dexter is overjoyed when they book into her Seaview Hotel.
However, as old tensions rise within the band, it’s clear each musician has something to hide. Why is lead singer Starr running away from her past? Why is Pete the drummer secretive about where he’s been for the last 40 years? And when guitarist Dave breaks his legs in a freak window-cleaning accident, a new guitarist arrives, causing even more discord for all. Then, as the band rehearse for their comeback gig, a dead body is found.
Can Seaview Hotel landlady Helen Dexter and her rescue greyhound Suki hit the right note and solve the crime?
Available to buy here
Connect with Glenda Young
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.
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