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 outward in
shock waves that leave all the characters forever changed.