Why did I love this book?
My mother was a nurse travelling with the Allies during the Liberation of Italy at exactly the time this story was set, so this book has a special place in my heart. Here the nurse is Hana, caring for a badly burned patient with no name in a crumbling Italian villa. As the patient recalls a passionate love affair from his past, Hana begins to fall for Kip, a Sikh sapper working on unexploded bombs left behind by the Germans. This is a beautiful and haunting story of the way that love can survive even the awful human suffering of war.
7 authors picked The English Patient as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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.