Exploring the Miraculous by Michael O’Neill (Our Sunday Visitor, £14). The author, an authority on Marian apparitions, provides a lively guide to all the questions people ask about miraculous events: are they real or fraudulent? What is their significance? How are they related to apparitions? He also explains the phenomenon of incorruptible bodies and examines cases of the stigmata. Thoroughly researched and eschewing sensationalism, his book is an excellent reference work for supernatural events of all kinds. It is well worth reading in order to counter the scepticism of those outside the Church. Phyllis Tickle: Essential Spiritual Writings (Orbis Books, £14.99). This book introduces Phyllis Tickle to a new readership. Author, lecturer and commentator on religious matters, Tickle, born in 1934, continues to live and write on her farm in Memphis. Founding religion editor of Publishers Weekly, her best-known book is Rediscovering the Sacred, published in 1995. She has also published poetry, prayers and an autobiography, The Shaping of a Life: a Spiritual Landscape. This sympathetic and knowledgeable selection has been made by Jon Sweeney, director of Franciscan Media. Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics by Joseph A Selling (Oxford University Press, £65). Joseph Selling does not ask us to abandon every aspect of traditional moral theology. He does invite us, however, to make room for a “behaviour-oriented” approach which embraces the diversity of individual motivation and moral action and seeks what Vatican II described as “the human person integrally and adequately considered”. Textbooks have their place, he seems to be saying, but if we want to live a life of moral virtue then we must also look within. Landskipping by Anna Pavord (Bloomsbury, £17.99). This intriguing title looks at the way landscape artists have made the spectacle of nature a source of contemplation and pleasure for tourists from the 18th century onwards. A passionate countrywoman and gardener, as well as author of the much-praised The Tulip, Pavord shows how different agricultural practices have also shaped the British landscape. Scholarly, yet written with brio, her book should be read by all those who love our unique countryside. A personal passage at the end describes where Pavord chose to scatter her mother’s ashes – on a Monmouthshire hillside. Bernard Buffet by Nicholas Foulkes (Preface Books, £25). This book explores the life of the famous French painter and his controversial artworks. The first scholarly biography of Buffet, it describes his swift ascent to fame in the 1950s, when he was seen as a 20-year-old prodigy, to his dramatic fall from grace, when he was ignored by the art establishment that had initially created him. In 1999 Buffet, aged 71 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, committed suicide. Foulkes, a historian and fine arts columnist, has written an absorbing story of a troubled man and his bleak vision.