The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a novel by Thornton Wilder, first published in 1927. Set in eighteenth-century Peru, it begins when an Inca rope bridge collapses and five lives end at once.

Brother Juniper, a Franciscan who witnesses the disaster, refuses to treat the choice of victims as random. He investigates their histories for six years, hoping to turn tragedy into evidence of a discoverable divine plan.

The inquiry opens the lives of the Marquesa de Montemayor and her companion Pepita, the twin Esteban, and Uncle Pio with the child Don Jaime. Their separate stories reveal hidden bonds among strangers, shaped by loneliness, devotion, dependence, and misunderstood love.

Wilder moves between biography, fable, and theological question without allowing Brother Juniper's calculations to settle the value of a life. The novel asks how people understand meaning after sudden loss when neither accident nor providence can be proved.

"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the high-road between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were always led out to see it."

This edition includes the original drawings by Amy Drevenstedt.