In the Library
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder, 1927
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 5
- Length
- Length 32k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Candide
Voltaire
Candide does the same thing, but turns catastrophe into philosophical comedy, testing whether a good God can preside over an unjust world through jokes rather than grief.
£1.99
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying does the same thing, but shrinks the canvas to one family's funeral journey, fracturing a single death into as many private truths as mourners.
£1.99
About the book
A rope bridge over a gorge in colonial Peru, woven by the Incas and crossed for generations without a second thought, snaps at noon and drops five travellers into the gulf below. A Franciscan called Brother Juniper is standing at the near end when it goes, and what he does afterwards is the whole book: six years spent gathering every scrap of those five lives, certain that if he can only account for them he will have proved, almost arithmetically, that God meant it. So you are given the Marquesa de Montemayor, writing letter after brilliant letter to a daughter in Spain who cannot bear her; twin brothers so close they have a language of their own; an old impresario who loved a girl into becoming the finest actress in Peru. Wilder never lets the ledger balance. He shows each of them at the moment they had just begun to learn how to love, and then walks them out onto the bridge.