Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen. A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family.


From Publishers Weekly
Canadian author Ondaatje offers a poetic novel set in a desolate Italian villa in the final days of WWII--a one-week PW bestseller--and an evocative account of a visit with his family in Sri Lanka. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In an Italian villa at the end of World War II, a young nurse cares for a soldier so horribly burned that he cannot be identified. Both patients and medical staff have decamped from this makeshift hospital, but Hana perseveres, worn out by the war and yet strangely linked to the dying man. Then a friend of her father arrives--a thief-turned-spy who recalls Hana as a young girl in Canada--and raises questions about "the English patient," claiming that he is instead a Hungarian who spied for the Third Reich. Finally, they are joined by a young Sikh named Kip, a soldier with a nearby English battalion who defuses the bombs left behind by the Germans. The discovery of the patient's identity, Kip's successful defusion of several bombs, and the complex emotional interaction of all four characters creates a tension that is nicely heightened by Ondaatje's stately, luminous prose. The prose is so stately, in fact, that Kip's final outrage at the moral perfidy of the Western world he has served so loyally takes a moment to hit. When it does, the novel moves beyond the poetic to achieve moral stature. Highly recommended for literary collections.- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Michael Ondaatje's novel, winner of the England's 1993 Booker Prize, is a perfect candidate for audio. A burn patient is cared for in a ruined Italian villa after the retreat of the Germans by a young nurse, a former spy and thief and a Sikh who clears the area of mines. Their various lives, past and current, entwine in a mystical novel full of vivid images which are marvelously conveyed through oral interpretation. Michael York presents an elegant narration--beautifully suited to the text. He carefully projects the subtle accents of each character with a smooth and polished delivery. His tone matches the author's and compliments each character. Making full use of the evocative language, York portrays the scenes and relationships with distinction. The abridgment is skillfull though there is a haunting sense that one hasn't experienced the entirety of the text. For serious fiction lovers, this is an audiobook not to be missed. R.F.W. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Canadian poet/novelist Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion, 1987, etc.) assembles, mosaic-fashion, the lives of four occupants of an Italian villa near Florence at the end of WW II. The war-damaged villa, its grounds strewn with mines, has gone from to German stronghold to Allied hospital, its sole occupants now a young Canadian nurse, Hana, and her last patient, a born victim. They are joined by David Caravaggio, an Italian-Canadian friend of Hana's father but also a thief used by Western intelligence, and Kip (Kirpal Singh), an Indian sapper in the British Army. So: a dying man and two wrecks--for David has become a morphine addict after his recent capture and torture, while Hana, who coped with the loss of her soldier sweetheart and their child (aborted), has been undone by news of her father's death. Only Kip is functioning efficiently, defusing the mines. Ondaatje superimposes on this tableau the landscape of the pre-war North African desert, with its strange brotherhood of Western explorers, filtered through the consciousness of Hana's patient. Though he claims to have forgotten his identity during the fiery fall from his plane into the desert, it seems the putative Englishman is the Hungarian explorer (and sometime German spy) Almasy; but such puzzles count for less than his erudition (his beloved Herodotus is the novel's presiding spirit), his internationalism (``Erase nations!''), and his doomed but incandescent love affair with the bride of an English explorer--an affair ignited by the desert and Herodotus, and a dramatic contrast to the ``formal celibacy'' of the love developing at the villa between Hana and Kip, which ends (crudely) when Kip learns of the Hiroshima bombing, discovers his racial identity, and quits the white man's war. A challenging, disorienting, periodically captivating journey without maps, best when least showy, as in the marvelous account of Kip's adoption by an eccentric English peer, his bomb-disposal instructor. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
?The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening.?
?Toni Morrison

?There are books that change the shape of literature.?The English Patient is such a book.?
?Books in Canada

?A magic carpet ride of a novel that soars across worlds and times.?A rare and spellbinding net of dreams.?
?Pico Iyer, Time

?An exotic, consuming, and richly inspired novel of passion.?
?Richard Ford


Book Description
The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.


From the Publisher
"A rare and spellbinding web of dreams."
--Time magazine"A magically told novel...ravishing...many-layered."
--Los Angeles Times"Profound, beautiful and heart-quickening."
--Toni Morrison"Lyrical.... An exquisite ballet that takes place in the dark." --Boston Sunday Globe"A tale of many pleasures--an intensely theatrical tour de force but grounded in Michael Ondaatje's strong feeling for distant times and places."
--The New York Times Book Review"A poetry of smoke and mirrors."
--Washington Post Book World"It is an adventure, mystery, romance, and philosophical novel in one.... Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet."
--Chicago Tribune


From the Inside Flap
The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the  intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.


About the Author
Michael Ondaatje is the author of three previous novels, a memoir and eleven books of poetry. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, he moved to Canada in 1962 and now lives in Toronto.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill toward the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house.

In the kitchen she doesn't pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.

She turns into the room which is another garden--this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, and he turns his head slowly towards her as she enters.

Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.

She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and he mutters.

What? she asks, coming out of her concentration.

He turns his dark face with its gray eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The bestselling-novel-turned-movie that garnered 9 Oscars including Best Picture. Four lives intertwine in this spellbinding tale set in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. "...an intensely theatrical tour de force."--The New York Times Book Review.

ANNOTATION

In a brilliantly original novel, four people come together in a deserted Italian villa during the final moments of World War II: a young American nurse and her horribly burned English patient, an American soldier of fortune, and an Indian soldier in the British army. Their stories of the past and of the present weave a spellbinding tapestry of how lives are caught and changed by the circumstances of war.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Michael Ondaatje's three previous novels have each been met with the highest praise: for their startling narrative inventiveness, the richness of their imagery and emotion, and the spellbinding quality of their language. When In the Skin of a Lion was published in 1987, Carolyn Kizer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ondaatje "a beautiful writer... brilliantly gifted." And Tom Clark wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that "Ondaatje handles fiction with the deceptive touch of a magician." Now, with The English Patient, he gives us his most stunningly original and lyric novel yet. During the final moments of World War II, in a deserted Italian villa, four people come together: a young nurse, her will broken, all her energy focused on her last, dying patient, a man in whom she has seen something "she wanted to learn, to grow into and hide in"... the patient: an unknown Englishman, survivor of a plane crash, his mind awash with a life's worth of secrets and passions ... a thief whose "skills" have made him one of the war's heroes, and one of its casualties ... an Indian soldier in the British army, an expert at bomb disposal whose three years at war have taught him that "the only thing safe is himself." Slowly, they begin to reveal themselves to each other, the stories of their pasts and of the present unfolding in scene after haunting scene, taking us into the Sahara, the English countryside, down the streets of London during the Blitz, into the makeshift army hospitals of Italy, and through the battered gardens and rooms of the villa. And with these stories, Ondaatje weaves a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation: the paths and details of four diverse lives caught and changed and now inextricably connected by the brutal, improbable circumstances of war.

FROM THE CRITICS

Gale Research

Ranking the author among such contemporary novelists as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, Cressida Connolly in the Spectator, praises the poetic quality of Ondaatje's fiction. "The writing is so heady that you have to keep putting the book down between passages so as not to reel from the sheer force and beauty of it," the reviewer exclaims, adding that "when I finished the book I felt as dazed as if I'd just awoken from a powerful dream."

San Francisco Chronicle

Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic...It transports the reader to another world.

New York Times Books of the Century

...[An] intensely theatrical tour de force [that] reveals, if not a great peace at the heart of the human mystery, a vision of how heroic the struggle is.

Library Journal

Who is this wounded soldier living at an abandoned Italian villa near the end of World War II? He does not remember his name, only that he is British, but pieces of his conversation betray his knowledge. For the woman nursing him, his past does not matter. But as their twosome is invaded by two others, all focus shifts to his "true'' identity. Ondaatje deals with the culture he knows best: the British family, living in Canada, relocated during the war. Poet that he is, he replaces narrative with vivid, lyric snapshots. Listeners may have to periodically rewind the tape to recall who is who, since the four ruminating voices, narrated by actor Michael York, are seldom identified by name, and flashbacks add to the confusion. But this book is best appreciated if listeners suspend a focus on the immediate narrative line, picking up bits of the story here and there, retaining enough imagery that eventually they understand a much greater whole. As such, it's a masterpiece. -- Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, Soho Weekly News

BookList - Donna Seaman

A man on fire parachutes from a burning plane, crash-landing in the Sahara. He is rescued by Bedouins who wrap him in oil and felt. World War II is winding to a miserable close, and eventually the man is brought to an Allied hospital set up in an old Italian villa. When the rest of the patients and staff leave for home, a young, half-mad Canadian nurse insists on staying behind with the unidentified burn victim. Hana's grief over the suffering of the wounded and her father's death have made her crave the ravaged beauty of the villa and the still company of this silent, pain-ridden man, but an old family friend tracks her down. A thief by nature, turned spy by the war, Caravaggio was captured and tortured. This trio of the wounded and haunted becomes a quartet when they are joined by Kirpal "Kip" Singh, a Sikh serving the British as a sapper, or mine-disarmer. Ondaatje slowly reveals the past of each of these battered survivors, evoking the subtleties of their psyches from the mysterious patient's deep knowledge of the desert to Kip's sixth sense for locating and neutralizing hidden bombs. This is a poetic and solemn narrative of the horrible process of war, the discipline, displacement, loss, and sudden, desperate love. Ondaatje seems to whisper, even confess each scene to his readers, handling them gingerly like shards of shattered glass. Yet another dazzler by this accomplished novelist and poet.Read all 8 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Profound, beautiful, and heart-quickening. — Toni Morrison