Amy Carmichael went to India and did not come back. For fifty-five years she stayed, founding the Dohnavur Fellowship and taking in children rescued from temple prostitution, and for the last twenty of those years she wrote from a bed she rarely left. Elisabeth Elliot tells the story without softening its edges.

Elliot was well placed to write it: a missionary herself, widowed in the field, and unsentimental about what the work costs. The title comes from Carmichael's own understanding of what she had signed up for. A substantial biography rather than a sketch, and one of the standard recommendations for anyone weighing a call to missions.