The English Patient
First edition cover
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| Author | Michael Ondaatje |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Cecil Beaton |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historiographic metafiction |
| Publisher | McClelland and Stewart |
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Publication date
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September 1992 |
| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 26257641 |
The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The four main characters are: an unrecognisably burned man—the titular patient, presumed to be English; his Canadian Army nurse, a Sikh British Army sapper, and a Canadian thief. The story occurs during the North African Campaign and centres on the incremental revelations of the patient's actions prior to his injuries, and the emotional effects of these revelations on the other characters. The book won the Booker Prize and the Governor General's Award.
The novel's historical backdrop is the North African/Italian Campaigns of World War II. The story is told out of sequence, moving back and forth between the severely burned "English" patient's memories from before his accident and current events at the bomb-damaged Villa San Girolamo, an Italian monastery, where he is being cared for by Hana, a troubled young Canadian Army nurse. The English patient's only possession is a well-worn, and heavily annotated copy of Herodotus's The Histories that has survived the fiery parachute drop. Hearing the book constantly being read aloud to him brings about detailed recollections of his desert explorations, yet he is unable to recall his own name. Instead, he chooses to believe the assumption by others that he is an Englishman based on the sound of his voice. The patient is in fact László de Almásy, a Hungarian Count and desert explorer, one of many members of a British cartography group.
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