This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novelâby the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teethâhas been beloved around the world for nearly a century.
This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individualsâa noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a childâcome to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined livesâsnuffed out in one shattering momentâilluminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novelâby the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teethâhas been beloved around the world for nearly a century.
This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individualsâa noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a childâcome to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined livesâsnuffed out in one shattering momentâilluminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.