Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

$13.46

Retail price: $14.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Timothy Andrés Pabon

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 3 hours 48 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

A spare and haunting novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and has informed how literature addressed tragedy ever since its initial publication in 1927

In eighteenth-century Peru, a rope bridge collapses, dropping five people to tragic deaths in the gorge below. In the aftermath, Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar and a witness to the disaster, strives to comprehend why these five people were fated to die in this way. Was it, he wonders, some form of divine Providence, or was it arbitrary and unrelated to the manner in which these people had led their lives?

In its exploration of love and loss, cosmic justice and injustice, and fate versus chance, The Bridge of San Luis Rey probes at questions that remain—that will always remain—fundamental to human existence.

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. His novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas: Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Wilder’s The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and cinema. His screenplay for Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day. Wilder’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature.

Timothy Andrés Pabon is an English- and Spanish-speaking voice-over artist who has had acting roles on House of Cards and has also been a costar on HBO’s acclaimed series The Wire. As a stage actor, he has worked off-Broadway at the June Havoc Theatre, and his regional credits include Center Stage, the Shakespeare Theatre, Arena Stage, the Hippodrome, Olney Theatre, Rep Stage, and GALA Hispanic Theatre.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

“A masterpiece.”

“A remarkably confident evocation of the secret springs of half a dozen men, women and children.”

“[The Bridge of San Luis Rey] leaves a vivid impression of society in the golden age of the most aristocratic capital of Latin America. The histories of the five people are told perfectly with sympathy and insight.”

“The essence of Mr. Wilder’s book is really the feeling in it; it is a ‘notation of the heart’ with sympathy. Gaily or sadly, but always with understanding, a belief in the miracle of love runs through it all.”

“One of the greatest reading novels in this century’s American writing…Wonderfully lucid reading.”

Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting