World Turned Upside Down: The Psalms and the spirituality of pain: Finding a way through by Alison Morgan (BRF, £12.99 (£11.69); 978-1-80039-166-6).

“There are no simple answers to life’s challenges, so how do we integrate our most testing experiences into our faith in a way which strengthens rather than weakens it? When we are at our weakest, when we feel we most need God and yet have no idea how to talk to him, it is the Psalms which leap to our rescue. With the psalmists as our guides, we learn to draw closer to God, to hear his voice in fresh ways, and to identify what it is that troubles us. Borrowing their words, we find that we are able to articulate our most painful feelings and walk through suffering with honesty, hope, and confidence in the God who travels beside us. Here is an opportunity to read the Psalms differently: an invitation to embark on a new journey.”

Women Remembered: Jesus’s female disciples by Helen Bond and Joan Taylor (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99 (£11.69); 978-1-529-37260-1). New in paperback

“Helen Bond and Joan Taylor explore the way in which Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary, Martha, and a whole host of other women — named and unnamed — have been remembered by posterity, noting how many were silenced, tamed or slurred by innuendo — though occasionally they get to slay dragons. Women Remembered looks at the representation of these women in art, and the way they have been remembered in inscriptions and archaeology. And of course they dig into the biblical texts, exposing misogyny and offering alternative and unexpected ways of appreciating these women as disciples, apostles, teachers, messengers and church-founders.”

Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand: A life reconsidered by Charles Marsh (Cascade Books, £12 (£10.80); 978-1-6667-3089-0).

“Charles Marsh responds to criticisms of his book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by exploring the largely unexamined relationship between theology and biography. In Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand, he argues that Bonhoeffer scholarship desperately needs the revitalizing energies of the theologian’s life story revisited and uncensored by the guild.”

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