The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder’s second novel, published in 1927, opens with a catastrophe: an old rope bridge in eighteenth-century Peru snaps, and five travelers plunge to their deaths. A Franciscan friar named Brother Juniper witnesses the fall and sets out to prove it was no accident, that divine reason governs who lives and who dies. To test the idea he reconstructs the lives of the five, and the novel becomes a set of interlinked stories about love given and withheld: the aging Marquesa and her young companion, the orphaned twins Esteban and Manuel, and old Uncle Pio with the actress he made famous. Spare and quietly devastating, it won the Pulitzer Prize and asks whether any pattern can be found in accident. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.
