Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927

In 1714 a bridge in Peru collapses killing five people, a priest who witnesses the accident is compelled to ask why those five were chosen by God to die, and after looking into each of the victim’s lives he draws his conclusions. It’s a necessary book about the danger of trying to divine religious meaning from random events and why bad things happen to undeserving people, written in a slightly arcane historical style that doesn’t make for fluid reading but does instead capture the time and place very well indeed. This also served as inspiration for John Hersey’s excellent journalistic Hiroshima.  PY

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