The English Patient - Softcover

Ondaatje, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039428013X ISBN 13: 9780394280134

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1993

Synopsis

With unsettling beauty and intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's 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.

About this title

Review

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 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

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 039428013X
• ISBN 13: 9780394280134
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 306