The English Patient

When In the Skin of a Lion was published in 1987, Carolyn Kizer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ondaatje a beautiful writer... brilliantly gifted. And Tom Clark wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that Ondaatje handles
fiction with the deceptive touch of a magician. Now, with The English Patient, he gives us his most stunningly original and lyric novel yet. During the final moments of World War II, in a deserted Italian villa, four people come together: a young
nurse, her will broken, all her energy focused on her last, dying patient, a man in whom she has seen something she wanted to learn, to grow into and hide in... the patient: an unknown Englishman