The English Patient

In a bombed villa north of Florence in the last weeks of the war, a Canadian nurse named Hana has stopped moving with her unit and stays behind to care for one patient: a man burned beyond recognition, pulled from a crashed plane in the Libyan desert by Bedouin, who does not say who he is. Three others gather at the villa. Caravaggio is a thief turned intelligence operative, maimed by his interrogators, who knew Hana's father and suspects the patient of being someone in particular. Kip is a Sikh sapper from the Punjab, trained in England, who spends his days defusing German mines in the surrounding countryside. And the patient, drifting on morphine, tells of desert expeditions before the war, of mapping the Gilf Kebir, and of Katharine Clifton, a colleague's wife. Ondaatje writes in fragments and images rather than sequence, and the four ruined people in the villa form a temporary household that the outside world will not permit to last. The news from Hiroshima arrives, and Kip's response fractures it. It is a novel about nationhood, and about what maps and borders do to people who thought themselves free of both.