Erik Varden
Rowan Williams’ Looking East in Winter (Bloomsbury, £20; Tablet price £18) is in some ways an austere read, reflecting a lifetime’s intellectual engagement with Orthodoxy. It is at the same time full of warmth. Williams’ account of holy folly is wonderful. And what a comfort, right now, to be reminded: “For anything to be natural is for it to be as God intends, to be in the state in and for which God created it.”

Morag MacInnes
Who better to celebrate, in his centenary year, than George Mackay Brown? Simple Fire (Birlinn, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69), the new short story collection, edited by Malachy Tallack, is a must-have. Universal themes – love, loss, longing – play out in the spare, simple landscape of Orkney. You’ll find drunks, gossips, saints and sinners, depicted with compassion and humour. Ali Smith calls Brown “one of the masters of the short story form”. She’s right.

Fiona Sampson
Eileen Hunt Botting’s Portraits of Wollstonecraft (Bloomsbury Academic, £389; Tablet price £350) is fascinating, authoritative and under-announced – especially after the Hambling statue debacle. This gloriously readable, two-volume compendium of reaction to the famous radical starts with eighteenth-­century print and image, moving through the canon – Virginia Woolf, poetry by Robert Browning – to contemporary international reception. Cartoons rub shoulders with Oxford lectures in a rich new kind of portraiture of both Wollstonecraft and our changing society.