The Vowed Life: The promise and demand of baptism, edited by Matthew Bullimore and Sarah Coakley (Canterbury Press £19.99 (Church Times SPECIAL OFFER PRICE £15.99); 978-1-78622-189-6).

“This landmark volume from an influential group of Anglican theologians and practitioners explores a phenomenon that is bubbling up in today's church: the renewal of vowed religious life in both traditional and emerging forms. Justin Welby describes this movement as essential to the renewal of the entire church, and Rowan Williams argues that it is vital for the health of the nation.” 

Generations: Age, ancestry, and memory in the English Reformations by Alexandra Walsham (OUP, £25 (£31.50); 978-0-19-885403-6).

“Generations injects fresh energy into tired debates about England’s plural and protracted Reformations by adopting the fertile concept of generation as its analytical framework. It demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations that experienced them, but were also forged and created by them. The book investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these, in turn, reconfigured the relationship between memory, history, and time.”

The Medieval Stained Glass of Herefordshire & Shropshire by Robert Walker (Logaston Press, £25 (£22.50); 978-1-910839-54-6).

“This richly-illustrated book represents the first comprehensive study of the medieval stained glass of Herefordshire and Shropshire, and includes a gazetteer of all known surviving stained glass in the two counties for the period c.1300–1700.”

Selected by Frank Nugent, of the Church House Bookshop, which operates the Church Times Bookshop.