The Bridge of San Luis Rey

A spare and haunting novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and has informed how literature addressed tragedy ever since its initial publication in 1927

In eighteenth-century Peru, a rope bridge collapses, dropping five people to tragic deaths in 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?

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.