The English Patient

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.

“Extraordinary”

The English Patient wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening -- Toni Morrison
All the allure of early twentieth-century desert exploration is contained in Ondaatje’s beautiful, spare narrative … A wise and graceful book about history itself, both the events that are its raw material and the human values that shape it Sunday Times
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
Ondaatje has now written the novel we have been awaiting from him: The English Patient is a masterpiece Financial Times
An novel-poetic, philosophical, moving … The English Patient has such a strange beauty that it requires and repays a reader’s act of faith. It is such a thought-provoking piece of writing that one if forced to consider its achievement Daily Telegraph
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

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Toronto. The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Anthony Minghella.

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