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Book Summary and Reviews of The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient

Man Booker Prize Winner (Vintage International)

by Michael Ondaatje

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  • Published:
  • Nov 1993, 320 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The bestselling author of Warlight traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. "A rare spellbinding web of dreams." —Time  

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A rare and spellbinding web of dreams." —Time

"Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic, it transports the reader to another world .... Ondaatje's most probing examination yet of the nature of identity." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. 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 pleasure of being there." —The Wall Street Journal

This information about The English Patient was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is the author of six previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize and subsequently the Golden Man Booker Prize, given in honor of the Prize's 50th anniversary; Anil's Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje now lives in Toronto.

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