Finding the Language of Grace: Rediscovering transcendence by Christopher Jamison (Bloomsbury, £14.99 (Church Times SPECIAL OFFER PRICE £12.99); 978-1-3994-0271-2).
“Finding the Language of Grace: Rediscovering transcendence focuses on the transcendent experiences of grace that we struggle to talk about in today’s very business-like culture. Abbot Christopher shows how the ways we listen and speak, read, and write can all be channels of grace. . . The power and the pain of grace resonate throughout the book, offering a new perspective on healing the loneliness and mistrust experienced by many, as well as on the turbulence and political extremes of today’s world.”
Heaven on Earth: The lives and legacies of the world’s greatest cathedrals by Emma J. Wells (Head of Zeus, £40 (£36); 978-1-78854-194-7).
“A glorious illustrated history of 16 of the world’s greatest cathedrals, interwoven with the extraordinary stories of the people who built them. The emergence of the Gothic in 12th-century France, an architectural style characterised by pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, large windows and elaborate tracery, triggered an explosion of cathedral-building across western Europe. It is this remarkable flowering of ecclesiastical architecture that forms the central core of Emma Wells’s authoritative but accessible study of the golden age of the cathedral.”
A Thousand Fates: The afterlife of medieval monasteries in England and Wales by Richard H. Taylor (Unicorn, £30 (£27); 978-1-914414-71-8).
“A Thousand Fates is not an account of why the monasteries closed or what happened to the people displaced. Instead, it focuses on the monastic buildings and their numerous fates and brings life to their stories.”
Selected by Frank Nugent, of the Church House Bookshop, which operates the Church Times Bookshop.