With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.
Editorial Reviews
"A tale of many pleasures—an intensely theatrical tour de force [that] reveals, if not a great peace at the heart of the human mystery, a vision of how heroic the struggle is." —The New York Times Book Review
"Sensusous, mysterious, rhapsodic....It transports the reader to another world, and uncovers that world's connection to our own." —San Francisco Chronicle
"A rare and spellbinding web of dreams." —Time
"Mr. Ondaatje [is] one of North America's finest novelists....The spell of his haunted villa remains with us, inviting us to reread passages for the pure pleasure of being there." —Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Michael Ondaatje is a novelist and poet who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of In The Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family. He received the Booker Prize and the Governor General's Award in Canada for The English Patient.
