The Elliott Bay Book Company

Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. The classic The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder is this month's choice. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.
By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death—and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition. At the time of its publication the New York Herald Tribune called it "A masterpiece." and Russell Banks says, "As close to perfect a moral fable as we are likely to get in American literature."

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Paperback)

By Thornton Wilder

$12.99

ISBN-13: 9780060088873
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 4/2003

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