This is a slim novel that won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer for fiction. It tells the stories of five people who lost their lives when an old vine-and-board bridge collapsed in Peru. The Marquesa, Esteban the copyist, and Uncle Pio are all inhabitants of Lima, and all are connected in ways which the book manages to reveal very gracefully. The best thing about it is that these relationships don’t seem at all forced, and so seem all the more truthful. The whole thing is framed as an attempt to “set the record straight” about who these people were, their secret dreams and aspirations, and how they all came to be on the bridge on that fateful day.

I’m going to have to reread Our Town and The Skin of our Teeth now, to see if there are similarities between those and this novel, maybe in style.