English patient

Author's name: Michael Ondaatje

Four lives converge in an abandoned house on a bombed-out Italian hill, late in the war: Hannah, the nurse whose spirit is consumed by death, amazingly tends to her last living patient; Caravaggio, the thief, trying to rethink his identity, now that his punished hands are of no use to him; Kip, the Indian, always searching for mines hidden in every land and corner, trusting no one but himself—each of them, in a different way, is preoccupied with the mystery of the man they know only as the English Patient: a nameless burn victim, lying in his bandages all the time in a room of the house. It is this man's passionate conversations about his memories in the Great Sand Sea and the deserts of Egypt and Libya, in the Cave of the Swimmers and the Great Gulf, about the Bedouins and their oases and their magic, his forbidden love, and his fierce anger - those memories ignite the story and reveal mysteries that travel in shock waves to those fleeing war and death around him at home, changing their lives forever.