The English Patient

In a bombed villa in Tuscany at the end of the Second World War, a Canadian nurse cares for a patient burned past recognition who will not say who he is. Around them gather a thief and a Sikh sapper defusing mines in the surrounding countryside. Ondaatje tells it in fragments that move between the villa and the pre-war desert expeditions where the patient’s identity was formed, and it won the Booker Prize in 1992 before Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation found it a far larger audience.