MAKING HASTE FROM BABYLON Nick Bunker (Bodley Head, £25)Any book about the Pilgrim Fathers is to be eagerly awaited. In his outstanding descriptions of land and seascape scattered throughout this book, Bunker offers a background that gives immediacy to the dedication and dreams of the hardy men and women of the Mayflower who sailed in 1620 into uncharted waters.

He goes much further in defying rose-tinted convention with a tough investigative approach to the Puritan community, their origins and their settlement.

This is a mosaic canvas that widens our view of the foundations of the New World. Bunker throws himself with a passion into the reasons why the pilgims left their homeland. They were, he claims, the nouveaux riche of Nottinghamshire. They may have been radical — certainly they had a great hatred of the Catholics — but they were clearly not complete religious zealots. Their ranks, as later marked out by their fortunes among native tribes in a pristine wilderness, included tradesmen and politicians. Their enterprise was financed as a deep-risk venture.

Bunker is at his best tracing the life they left behind — a seething mix of poverty and insecurity that denied them freedom under Queen Elizabeth and James I.

One of the most interesting episodes details the pilgrims’ secret flight by coal barge up the River Trent. They are surprised by militia, the wives and children stranded as the able-bodied men escape. The irony is that the magistrates do not know what to do with them and eventually they are reunited with their husbands in Holland. Later, under the leadership of William Bradford, who became the first governor of the new Plymouth colony, just over 100 Puritans would make the greater voyage to America.

The first harsh winter took an immeasurable toll on the pilgrims but the survivors endured. It was the beaver trade that ultimately saved them, with beaver hats being much in demand in the royal chambers back in England. Economics ultimately ruled as the Puritans fasted and prayed.

It is in the sweeping detail of Bunker’s narrative, with its poetic sense of hope, tragedy and ambition that makes this book rise above others. The Puritans have never had such a chronicler, an explorer in his own right of long-neglected sources.