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.
*****
Here & Now – The Steps Musical, Cliffs Pavillion Southend, 7-11 October 2025
Happiness is only a heartbeat away with Here & Now, the hilarious and heart-warming new musical based on the songs of the multi-million-selling pop phenomenon, Steps.
Welcome to seaside superstore Better Best Bargains, where it’s Friday night, the vibe is right, and everyone’s dancing in the aisles. But when Caz discovers the shelves are stocked with lies and betrayal, the summer of love she and her friends dreamed of suddenly feels like a tragedy. Have they all lost their chance of a ‘happy ever after’? With Caz, Vel, Neeta and Robbie around, who knows what love has in store…
*****
The Band, Palace Theatre Southend, 8-11 October
It’s 1992 and for five 16 year-old girls, ‘The Band’ is everything. Twenty-five years later, the group of girls, who were once inseparable, reunite in Prague to see their heart-throbs one last time, and try once more to fulfil their dream of meeting the boy band whose music became the soundtrack to their lives.
The Band features the music of Take That, one of Britain’s most successful boy bands of all time.
Murder At Midnight, Palace Theatre Southend, 13-18 October 
It’s New Year’s Eve in a quiet corner of Kent and a killer is in the house.
We meet Jonny ‘The Cyclops’ – the notorious gangster, his glamorous wife, his trigger-happy sidekick, his mum, who’s seeing things, her very jittery carer, plus a vicar who’s hiding something, and a nervous burglar dressed as a clown.
Throw in a suitcase full of cash, a stash of deadly weapons, and one infamous unsolved murder… What could possibly go wrong?
Join us for a murder mystery with a difference. One house. Seven suspects and a Murder At Midnight.
*****
Crack The Case by Charlotte Baker
Bella Grayson is a crime author living an idyllic life in a sleepy village in Derbyshire, where her book club ‘Crack The Case’ spends its sessions exploring some of the best-known mystery novels of all time.
However Bella finds herself enveloped in a real-life investigation of her own when long-running member Susie is found dead and suspicion falls upon book club members and village residents alike.
Will Bella be able to crack the case in real life and ensure the culprit is brought to justice?
Broken Horses by Kate Beales
Patagonia, 1921. Racked with guilt after leaving her wounded fiancé in the aftermath of the Great War, Georgie Carruthers crosses the ocean to southern Patagonia to forget the past and to start a new life as the governess of a motherless boy with the Creeds, a wealthy estancia family, frozen in colonial expectations and manners.
Central to this straight-jacketed world is Raul, the horse breaker whose warmth, wisdom and integrity captures Georgie’s heart – just as Mr Creed starts to think Georgie might make a useful second wife. The initial love triangle subverts narrative expectations and breaks into a world of desperate politics.
Two poignant relationships steal our hearts: between the horse breaker and the governess, and between the horse breaker and his beloved Hero.
Available to buy here
Connect with Kate Beales
All The Way To The River by Elizabeth Gilbert
In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya.
They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.
What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously re-enacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?
All The Way To The River is a landmark memoir that will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love – or to any other passion, substance or craving – and who yearns, at long last, for liberation.
If you think you’re safe in a hospital… think again.
On Sarah’s first visit to see her foster mother, Mim, in Brockburn General Hospital, she is sucked into a world that isn’t what it should be.
Someone is lying, someone is stealing. And someone is killing, but who? With a grieving child to take care of, as well as Mim, Sarah has to put family first.
She doesn’t see where danger lies – until it’s too late.
Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei
In Earth’s near-future, seas consume coastal cities and mutant fish lurk in their depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.
Her eldest sister, Nora, left home in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. Now, she’s missing. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to save her.
But their voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange brings them to question the dangerous attention Nora attracted, and how well do they really know their sister – or each other?
Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship and ecological disaster.
The Whistler by Nick Medina
The Fear by Tom Palmer
Kian’s best mate Azeem is desperate for them both to join the local football team.
He can’t understand why Kian’s reluctant, as he’s one of the best players on their estate.
But a bad experience with a former coach has robbed Kian of all his confidence. He wants to support his friend, but doesn’t think he can face the pressure of being part of a team again.
Can Kian overcome ‘The Fear?’
Available to buy here
Connect with Tom Palmer
Steph Harper is on the run.
When she was five, her mother ran – with Steph and her younger sister in tow – from an abusive husband into the arms of a small Cherokee community, where she hoped they might finally belong.
But Steph soon sets her sights as far away as she can get, vowing she’ll let nothing interfere with her dream to become an astronaut and, ultimately, to go to the moon.
In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with the three women who know and love her most dearly: her younger sister Kayla, an artist whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places, her college girlfriend Della, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her family as a young girl through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, and her mother Hannah, who has held up her family’s history as a beacon of inspiration to her kids, all the while keeping the truth about her own past a secret.
Available to buy here
Connect with Eliana Ramage
Winter Nights At The Bay Bookshop by Jessica Redland
Nestled amongst the comforting shelves of her beloved Bay Books, Lily Appleton finds the peace and quiet she needs.
But with Christmas just around the corner, Lily has to find an extra pair of hands to help her share the bookish magic.
After selling his business, Lars Jóhannsson is feeling lost. A job at Bay Books would give him the space he needs to contemplate his next move, but returning would mean confronting a painful past he’s been avoiding. He’s also fairly sure he’s the one person Lily would never want to see again.
Lily is torn. Lars could be the perfect fit for Bay Books, but he once rejected her friendship and the hurt still lingers. Working together, Lily discovers a vulnerability Lars has kept hidden away, along with a few surprising secrets. As the Christmas season sprinkles its magic, Lily discovers the warmth of renewed friendship and the joy of heartwarming traditions from Lars’s Icelandic roots.
Available to buy here
Connect with Jessica Redland
Threads Of Home by Mary L Walsh
A poetry collection from Mary L Walsh.
Threads Of Home attends to the multiple identities arising from an Irish upbringing outside of Ireland.
The poems are accompanied by a series of paintings by Mary’s cousin, Brid Ni Chionnfhaolaidh.
Available to buy here
Connect with Mary L Walsh
Old Books: New Life by Rebecca Wash
Discover the joy of transforming unwanted books into beautiful, practical, and surprising creations.
Old Books : New Life is a treasure trove of eco-friendly craft projects, step-by-step tutorials, and inspiration for giving books a fresh purpose.
Packed with creative ideas, full-colour photographs, and tips for crafters of all levels, this book will help you turn forgotten pages into works of art – from home décor to stationery and unique handmade gifts.
Available to buy here
Connect with Rebecca Wash
Deadly Dancing At The Seaview Hotel by Glenda Young
Meet Tommy Two Shoes, Ballroom Bev and their quirky troupe of dancers when the glamorous world of ballroom dancing comes to the seaside town of Scarborough.
However, beneath the glitter balls and sequins, there’s bitter rivalry between the group, both on and off the dance floor, and the competition turns deadly when one of them ends up dead.
Helen Dexter’s Seaview Hotel plays host to the dance troupe when the murder takes place. Aided by her rescue greyhound Suki and the Seaview Hotel cook Jean (a no-nonsense Yorkshire woman you don’t want to mess with!), Helen steps out and puts her best foot forward. But can she solve the crime?
Available to buy here
Connect with Glenda Young
Chicken In The Kitchen by Neal Zetter
In this rollicking greatest-hits collection covering Neal’s first eight Troika books, he has chosen poems children have most frequently requested during his 20 years of school visits.
Books covered include Bees In My Bananas, It’s Not Fine To Sit On A Porcupine, Here Come The Superheroes, Yuck And Yum, Invasion Of The Supervillains, Gorilla Ballerina, When The Bell Goes and Scared?
With the inclusion of two new bonus poems, this is a fantastic introduction to the ever-creative mind of one of the UK’s most beloved children’s poets.
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 25 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.
