Michael Ondaatje lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb-riddled Italian villa in the last days of World War II. Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper – each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories – of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal – illuminate the story and leave all the characters for ever changed.