The Story Archive

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · 1992 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

In a shelled Tuscan villa at the end of the war a Canadian nurse stays behind with a burned man who cannot be moved and remembers nothing anyone can check, joined there by a thief with ruined hands and a Sikh sapper clearing the mines. The patient's copy of Herodotus, thickened with pasted-in maps and notes, holds an account of a desert survey expedition and of a married woman who went out with it. Ondaatje was the first Canadian to take the Booker, sharing the prize that year.

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