The story examines the lives of the five people who die together that day, uncovering layer after layer of relationships and purpose.

The story is set in the 18th century in colonial Peru at the moment one of the astounding rope bridges that crisscrossed the Andean gorges of the Inca Empire collapses. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile’s Robin Whitten discuss Thom Rivera’s narration of this brief but engaging audiobook. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.Ī new audio version of Thornton Wilder’s classic novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey is good news. Overall, an extraordinary copy.Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. Rare dust jacket with a few small chips to head of spine and light spine toning. Text block with a few splits (as often) but holding cloth clean. Octavo, original cloth, original dust jacket. The texture is completely unified nothing falls short of its mark nothing exceeds it and the book as a whole is like some faultless temple erected to a minor deity'' ( American National Biography). 1927), Malcolm Cowley called the book 'perfect in itself. Its last statement applies to many of Wilder's works: 'There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.' Wilder was unprepared for the acclaim that followed the publication of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In telling the story of a fatal bridge collapse set in eighteenth-century Peru, Wilder 'sets forth themes that recur in fiction: love, brotherhood, tolerance, and faith.

So it was issued as one of those things 'which add dignity to a publisher's list.' It became the Pulitzer Prize novel for 1928, and was for two or three years a best-seller' (Vernon Loggins, I Hear America). Its sponsors recognized its original beauty and the high quality of its style. 'Thornton Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey is as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature.' -Russell BanksįIRST AMERICAN EDITION, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY THORNTON WILDER on front free endpaper: 'For Ida Freedman / Thornton Wilder' The Bridge of San Luis Rey 'proved to be one of the great surprises in the history of American publishing.

The bridge of luis rey