The Pilgrim's Progress

An allegory that reads like an adventure. Christian leaves the City of Destruction with a burden on his back and a book in his hand, and everything he meets on the road to the Celestial City is both a place and a thing that happens to people: the Slough of Despond, the Hill Difficulty, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Bunyan's genius is that the allegory never feels like a code to be decrypted — Giant Despair is simply frightening.

Bunyan was a tinker with little formal schooling who spent twelve years in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching. The book was begun in prison, and its landscape is English and ordinary: the mud, the by-paths, the magistrates at Vanity Fair who try Faithful for refusing to trade. Its characters talk the way people actually talked, which is why it escaped the church and became one of the most widely translated books in the world.

A second part followed six years later, and it is the half most readers have never opened: Christiana, who stayed behind in the first book, sets out with the children and a neighbour, and travels the same road in company rather than alone. The terrors are the same terrors; the difference is that someone is there. Bunyan wrote it partly because imitators had begun publishing sequels of their own.

It has never been out of print since 1678. Read it as a story first; the theology is load-bearing, but Bunyan built it into the walls rather than hanging it on them.