2023 Reprint of the 1927 U.S. Edition. Set in 18th century Lima, Peru, a rickety bridge which has spanned a deep gorge for ages suddenly breaks, and five people plunge to their deaths. A priest who is deeply affected by the catastrophe decides to make an investigative study of the lives of the victims to determine if he can find some clue to God's intention in casting five individuals into eternity at precisely the same moment.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and was the best-selling work of fiction that year. It has also been made into several movies. It tells the story of several people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar who witnesses the accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die.

"One of the greatest reading novels in this century's American writing... Wonderfully lucid reading." Edmund Fuller

"A remarkably confident evocation of the secret springs of half a dozen men, women and children..." Clifton Fadiman