The English Patient

The English Patient is a 1992 novel by the Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. It brings four dissimilar people together at an Italian villa during the Italian campaign of the Second World War: a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief, and a burned man who is presumed to be English and who cannot be identified.

Hana, the nurse, stays behind with her patient when the hospital moves north, and the novel's present is the house and the garden around it. The patient's history arrives in pieces, among them a desert expedition, a map and a love affair, while the sapper's work clearing unexploded bombs gives the book its other main thread, and the two stories are connected by the war and by the countries the characters came from.

Ondaatje writes in a style that moves between the villa and the memories of the people in it, without a single governing narrator, and the novel's interest is in how people who have been damaged keep going. It won the Booker Prize, and it remains the novel he is best known for.