The past few weeks have given us a chance to take stock, quite literally, with a stock-take of our bookshop providing a reason to venture into the high shelves and darkened corners for books that have evaded human touch since last January. It is also the time for reflecting on 2025 and carefully writing our very own glowing school report to submit to The British Book Awards’ inspector-ate, documenting the myriad ways the bookshop has connected people to reading over the calendar year. Gathering our energy to look ahead means planning for April, and a new financial year has its own material challenges for many shops. Changes to how business rates are calculated will kick in from April and we are far from alone in expecting a significant increase in our bills. All of which presents a tricky backdrop to a month where 400 paperbacks submitted for preview will hit the shelves as the book trade prepares for a burst of spring reading.

Early bloomers, literary fiction and crime and thrillers dominate the fiction submissions, with a significant number of debuts among them. The raucous imagination of Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play (Picador), Karla Marie Sweet’s False Idols (Mountain Leopard Press), Mikey Please’s The Expanded Earth (Corsair), Oisín Fagan’s Eden’s Shore (John Murray) and Seán Hewitt’s Open, Heaven (Vintage) are among the pick of the bunch for those looking for a first flowering. Crime aficionados will be delighted  to see popular perennials like Mick Herron returning us to Slough House in Clown Town(Baskerville), Katy Watson’s fifth Three Dahlias outing in A Deadly Night at the Theatre (Constable) and Karin Smirnoff revisiting the world of Lisbeth Salander in  The Girl with Ice in Her Veins(MacLehose Press).

Non-fiction reflects the shifting times we live in. Two key memoirs are noteworthy for their positive questioning of the very idea of normal – Robin Ince’s Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity (Pan) and France s Ryan’s memoir Who Wants Normal? – Life Lessons from Disabled  Women (Penguin). Other titles confronting the status quo and pushing for systemic change to improve  our common good include Devi Sridhar’s How Not to Die (Too Soon): The Lies We’ve  Been Sold and the Policies That Can Save Us (Penguin) and the tragic yet hopeful posthumous publication of Dom Phillips’ How to Save the Amazon:  A Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers(Ithaka), completed by  an array of contributors with  the specialist knowledge to continue Phillips’ work.

The intersection of the personal story with international conflict registers profoundly in Malcolm Gaskill’s The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy (Penguin), Oleksandr Mykhed’s The Language of War (Penguin) and Peter Beinart’s moving Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (Atlantic Books). Nature writing is also well represented with a reissue of Len Howard’s Bird Life: The Extraordinary World of Ordinary Birds (Vintage Classics) calling happily alongside Susana Monsó’s Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death (Princeton University Press) and Susannah Walker’s The Hard Way: Discovering the Women Who Walked Before Us (Wilton Square Books). Working at Sam Read Bookseller in the Lakes helps us enjoy the burst of nominative determinism in Walker’s study of the outdoors, too.

Exciting designs for backlist titles include the new Granta Shorts series, which reintroduces the list with bright new artwork for four acclaimed novellas: Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef and Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl. Three of Margaret Drabble’s backlist novels join the ever-chic Canongate Canons, The Witch of Exmoor, The Realms of Gold and The Garrick Year. Verso also expand their The Essential John Berger series with a handful of titles spanning Berger’s critical and creative range.

April 2026: Paperback Previews