Bridge of San Luis Rey (AmazonClassics Edition), The

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel begins with the inexplicable: the tragic collapse of a rope bridge in eighteenth-century Peru, leading to the deaths of five people who fall into the gorge below. In the aftermath, Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar and a witness to the disaster, strives to comprehend why these five people were fated to die in this way. Was it, he wonders, some form of divine Providence, or was it arbitrary and unrelated to the manner in which these people had led their lives? Wilder’s spare and haunting novel has gone on to inform many subsequent attempts to understand mass tragedies, including John Hersey’s Hiroshima, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s memorial speech following 9/11. In its exploration of love and loss, cosmic justice and injustice, and fate versus chance, The Bridge of San Luis Rey probes at questions that remain—that will always remain—fundamental to human existence.

Revised edition: Previously published as The Bridge of San Luis Rey, this edition of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.