The English patient - Michael Ondaatje

WINNER OF THE GOLDEN MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018'Magnificent' Sunday Times'The best piece of fiction I've read in years' Independent on SundayThe final curtain is closing on the Second World War and in an abandoned Italian village. Hana, a nurse, tends to her sole remaining patient. Rescued from a burning plane, the anonymous Englishman is damaged beyond recognition and haunted by painful memories. The only clue Hana has to unlocking his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes detailing a tragic love affair.

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Toronto. The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Anthony Minghella.

A masterpiece
Financial Times

Magnificent
Sunday Times

Extraordinary
Daily Telegraph

The English Patient wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening
Toni Morrison

Language of such riveting beauty that one is made to stop and stare
Observer

One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time
Guardian

The best piece of fiction in English I've read in years
Independent on Sunday

An exotic, consuming and richly inspired novel of passion. In its elegance and its satisfactions it resembles no book I know
Richard Ford

Feats of daring espionage, aeroplanes mysteriously buried beneath desert sand, archaeological exploration in the Sahara and nail-biting accounts of bomb-disposal against a nervous clock … this is the real thing: muscular, resonant, alive
Spectator

In descriptive prose of spectacular beauty, he invents a desert world which is both physical and imaginative. This is one of the few truly great post-war novels
Irish Times

A magic carpet of a novel that soars across worlds and times … As rare and spellbinding
net of dreams as any that has emerged in recent years
Time

In this masterful novel Ondaatje weaves a beautiful and light-handed prose through the histories of people caught up in love and war. A rich and compelling work of fiction
Don DeLillo

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 pleasures of being there
Wall Street Journal

A tale of many pleasures--an intensely theatrical tour de force but grounded in Michael Ondaatje's strong feeling for distant times and places
New York Times Book Review

It is an adventure, mystery, romance, and philosophical novel in one ... Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet
Chicago Tribune

Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic, it transports the reader to another world … Ondaatje's most probing examination yet of the nature of identity
San Francisco Chronicle

A novel so compelling that you will likely read it as I did, in a single sitting. But it's also one of those rare novels with so much poetry and lucidity that you will find yourself reading it a second and third time, savouring it beauty and intelligence for weeks … The English Patient is simply one of the best novels I have read in years
Russell Banks