Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning best seller lyrically portrays the
convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb-riddled Italian villa in the last
days of the war. Hana, the grieving nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the
emotionally detached Indian sapper, Kip--each is haunted in different ways by
the riddle of the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn
victim who lies swathed in bandages in an upstairs room. It is this man's
incandescent memories--of the bleak North African desert, of explorers' caves
and Bedouin tribesmen,
of forbidden love, and of annihilating anger--that illuminate the story, and the
consequences of the mysteries they reveal radiate