Faith Cook has been a lover of John Bunyan’s work for many years, first encountering him through The Pilgrim’s Progress in preschool years. Later she discovered through his ‘Complete Works’ his many other books and ten years ago she wrote Fearless Pilgrim, a detailed biography of Bunyan. Now she has taken up her pen again to write this well-paced and accessible biography that will appeal to every reader. Inevitably it is more than just a biography: this is a story told so that the Lord Jesus Christ is glorified and the reader can find encouragement for their own pilgrim path. Bunyan suffered in many ways and his own words express best the message this book brings:

(God) can make those things that in themselves are most fearful and terrible to behold, the most pleasant, delightful and desirable things. He can make a gaol more beautiful than a palace… He can so sweeten our sufferings with the honey of his word… and make them so easy by the spreading of his feathers over us that we shall not be able to say that in all the world a more comfortable position can be found.

Faith Cook, the daughter of OMF missionaries, was born in China and now lives in Derbyshire, England. She is the author of a number of books, including Fearless pilgrim: the life and times of John Bunyan; Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day Queen of England; Anne Bradstreet: pilgrim and poet; Seeing the invisible; And so I began to read… and three historical novels, Under the scaffold, Caught in the web and Stronger than the sword, all published by EP.