Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 305 pages
Audiobook Length: 8 hours and 56 minutes
First Published: 1992
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Publisher’s Description
With unsettling beauty and intelligence, this Golden Man Booker Prize–winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II.
The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions—and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
Quotes from The English Patient
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Movie Trailer for The English Patient (1996)
About Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje is an author whose works include The English Patient, Warlight, and The Cat’s Table. Born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje currently lives in Toronto.
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