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The English Patient
Reader Score
79%
79% of readers
recommend this book
Winner:Booker Prize -Novel (1992)
Nominee:Book Sense Book of the Year Award -Adult (1993)
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 anddetails of four diverse lives caught and changed and now inextricably connected by the brutal, improbable circumstances of war.
Book Details
- Publisher: Vintage
- Publish Date: Nov 30th, 1993
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.02in - 5.20in - 0.66in - 0.52lb
- EAN: 9780679745204
- Categories: • Literary• Historical - General• Classics
About the Author
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.
Praise for this book
"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