The People’s Offering: Renewing eucharistic perspectives by Ron Browning (Sacristy Press, £16.99 (£15.29); 978-1-78959-423-2).

“For centuries, Christian worship has centred on receiving grace at the Lord’s Table. But is the Eucharist only about receiving? In The People’s Offering, Ron Browning invites readers to rediscover the neglected dimension of offering — our prayers, our lives, and our hope-within the sacrament.” 

William Tyndale and the English Language by David Crystal (Bodleian Library Publishing, £25 (£22.50); 978-1-85124-665-6).

“In the first half of this pioneering exploration of the extraordinary impact Tyndale’s writing had on the development of the English language, David Crystal provides an analysis of his prose style, demonstrating its character as a novel genre of ‘written speech’, and bringing to light the remarkable number of cases where Tyndale is the first recorded user of a word or phrase in English. He also draws attention to the hitherto unrecognised role of Tyndale as an early lexicographer. The second half of the book is a linguistic detective story, devising an innovative lexical and grammatical metric to investigate the often-stated claim that eighty per cent of later biblical translations display Tyndale’s influence.”

Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent by Charles Taliaferro and Jil Evans (Cambridge University Press £18 (£16.20); 978-1-009-63159-4).

“Murdoch proposed that, ideally, our lives may be a pilgrimage toward the Good. She believed that the experience of beauty and art can enhance the pursuit of the Good. And yet Murdoch shunned the quest to discover some meaningful, transcendent reality (God or an impersonal, purposive force) to understand ourselves and the cosmos. In her words, ‘we are simply here.’ The authors ask whether Murdoch’s foregoing a search for a broader transcendent reality to understand why we are here is compelling.

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