The final curtain is closing on the Second World War and in an abandoned Italian village Hana, a nurse, tends to her sole remaining patient. Rescued from a burning plane, the anonymous Englishman is damaged beyond recognition and haunted by painful memories.
The only clue Hana has to unlocking his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes detailing a tragic love affair.
Industry Reviews
A masterpiece * Financial Times *
Magnificent * Sunday Times *
Extraordinary * Daily Telegraph *
The English Patient wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening -- Toni Morrison
Language of such riveting beauty that one is made to stop and stare * Observer *
One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time * Guardian *
The best piece of fiction in English I've read in years * Independent on Sunday *
An exotic, consuming and richly inspired novel of passion. In its elegance and its satisfactions it resembles no book I know -- Richard Ford
Feats of daring espionage, aeroplanes mysteriously buried beneath desert sand, archaeological exploration in the Sahara and nail-biting accounts of bomb-disposal against a nervous clock ... this is the real thing: muscular, resonant, alive * Spectator *
In descriptive prose of spectacular beauty, he invents a desert world which is both physical and imaginative. This is one of the few truly great post-war novels * Irish Times *
A magic carpet of a novel that soars across worlds and times ... As rare and spellbinding net of dreams as any that has emerged in recent years * Time *
In this masterful novel Ondaatje weaves a beautiful and light-handed prose through the histories of people caught up in love and war. A rich and compelling work of fiction -- Don DeLillo
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 pleasures of being there * Wall Street Journal *
A tale of many pleasures--an intensely theatrical tour de force but grounded in Michael Ondaatje's strong feeling for distant times and places * New York Times Book Review *
It is an adventure, mystery, romance, and philosophical novel in one ... Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet * Chicago Tribune *
Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic, it transports the reader to another world ... Ondaatje's most probing examination yet of the nature of identity * San Francisco Chronicle *
A novel so compelling that you will likely read it as I did, in a single sitting. But it's also one of those rare novels with so much poetry and lucidity that you will find yourself reading it a second and third time, savouring it beauty and intelligence for weeks ... The English Patient is simply one of the best novels I have read in years -- Russell Banks
