The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje (used)

Italy, 1945. As the Second World War ends, four damaged people take shelter in a bombed-out villa in the hills outside Florence. Hana, a young Canadian nurse worn down by the war, has stayed behind to care for a single patient: a man burned beyond recognition who remembers almost nothing about himself except that he is English. She is joined by Caravaggio, a thief turned Allied spy who knew her father, and Kip, a Sikh sapper in the British army whose job is to defuse the mines left behind in the countryside.

Over the weeks that follow, the patient's memories return in fragments: desert expeditions across North Africa in the 1930s, the maps and the sandstorms, and a consuming affair with Katharine Clifton, the wife of a fellow explorer. Caravaggio becomes convinced the patient is not who he claims to be, and the truth about him draws the whole household back into the war they thought they had left.

The novel was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1992 and was voted the Golden Man Booker in 2018, the best winner of the prize's first fifty years. Anthony Minghella's 1996 film adaptation won nine Academy Awards.

'Profound, beautiful and heart-quickening' – Toni Morrison

Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Picador (film tie-in edition)
Format: Paperback, 307 pages
Condition: Good (second-hand)