27th February 2026


Our expert


Will Smith Will is co-owner of Sam Read Bookseller, an independent bookshop in Grasmere that has served the Lake District for more than 130 years. He has more than two decades of experience in bookselling with previous roles at Blackwell’s and Ottakar’s. Will has been a judge for the Nero Book Awards, Costa Book Awards and the Nature Chronicles Prize, writes book reviews for Cumbria Life magazine and regularly appears on BBC Radio Cumbria.


Paperback Preview May


Previews


Late spring’s paperback offering is blooming


Non-fiction paperbacks this month celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July and the men’s FIFA World Cup


F 10


ebruary half term has reintroduced wuthering heights of browsers to our stock- checked bookshelves,


with the public’s first signs of “going all in” for the National Year of Reading bringing all kinds of quandaries for potential reorder- ing. With new titles and backlist titles seemingly as popular as each other, it is a special game to decide what must give up its shelf space in favour of future publica- tions. After all, there will always be more books. There were 420 submissions


for May’s paperback preview, heavily weighted towards non- fiction with a mass of history and biography to pore over. The 81st anniversary of VE Day sees the paperback arrival of last year’s


commemorative hardbacks, with wartime studies drawing fresh attention to period voices, includ- ing Geraint Jones’ Voices of Victory (Pan), Tessa Dunlop’s Lest We Forget (HarperNorth) and Lucy Noakes’ The People’s Victory (Atlantic Books). Prize-nominated books are also heading into paper- back, from American journalist Barbara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins (Granta Books), freshly longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, to Lally MacBeth’s The Lost Folk: From the Forgotten Past to the Emerging Future of Folk (Faber), recently longlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize. Non-fiction anticipates an anniversary year, celebrating


Books


Paperback Preview


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68