Торнтон Уайлдер: The bridge of San Luis Rey

“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.”

The citizens of Peru crossed themselves and whispered prayers of thanks for their deliverance. But in the mind of Brother Juniper, a humble monk who witnessed the catastrophe, burned the question, “Why did this happen to those five?”

As Brother Juniper’s investigations illuminate the possibility of an Intention to the disaster—involving the lives left behind as well as those lost on the bridge—the reader rediscovers the one “bridge” between the land of the living and the land of the dead that does not fall.