The final curtain is closing on the Second World War, and Hana, a nurse, stays behind in an abandoned Italian villa to tend to her only remaining patient. Rescued by Bedouins from a burning plane, he is English, anonymous, damaged beyond recognition and haunted by his memories of passion and betrayal. The only clue Hana has to 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 describing a painful and ultimately tragic love affair.
 
Accolades

Winner of Booker Prize for Fiction 1992. 

"Booker Prize Winner 1992. At the end of World War II a nurse is living in a ruined villa in Tuscany, tending a single patient - an English pilot who had stepped, burned black, from his crashed plane into the arms of a North African desert tribe which added their wisdom to his own. To the villa come her old friend Caravaggio, maimed physically and mentally by the war, and a young Sikh bomb disposal officer. Pellucid prose, mysterious compelling symbolism, fluid movement backward and forward in time make this enigmatic, sometimes difficult novel impossible to forget." (Kirkus UK)
Author Biography

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.