Paperback. Cream cover with black title.

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• THIS FROST PAPERBACK is a USED book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book from Frost’s shop, the delivery charge of £3.00 is deducted

For conditions, please view our photographs. An original  book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG.

The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian campaign of World War II: an unrecognizably burned man—the eponymous patient who is presumed to be English—; his Canadian Army nurse; a Sikh sapper; and a Canadian self-described thief. The story is primarily set during the North African campaign and centers on the incremental revelations of the patient’s actions prior to his injuries, and the emotional effects of these revelations on the other characters. The story is told through the characters’ perspectives and “authors” of books the characters are reading. The book is a sequel to the 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion, which continues the story of characters of his stories of Hana and Caravaggio; as well as revealing the fate of the latter’s main character, Patrick Lewis. It won the 1992 Booker Prize, the 1992 Governor General’s Award and the 2018 Golden Man Booker. The English Patient was adapted into a 1996 film of the same name. It was in early development in August 2021 for a new BBC television series, co-produced by Miramax Television and Paramount Television Studios. In 2022, the novel was included on the “Big Jubilee Read” list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

Review: The novel concerns the coming together of four people in Italy in the immediate aftermath of world war 2. This novel is the work of a poet and that is evident in every paragraph and every sentence of the writing here. It’s also perhaps evident in the lack of a single compelling narrative. Rather there are tableaux from the lives of each of the 4 people and of the 4 people sometimes interacting in ones and twos and sometimes all together; and strong and memorable portraits of 4 people, what they’ve each suffered during the war, and a time and a place as they make sense of their lives.

Philip Michael Ondaatje CC FRSL is a Sri Lanka-born Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist. Ondaatje’s literary career began with his poetry: in 1967 he published The Dainty Monsters, and in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. His novel The English Patient (1992), adapted as a film in 1996, received the Booker Prize in 1992. It later won the Golden Man Booker Prize as the best of the first 51 Booker Prize winners. Ondaatje has been “fostering new Canadian writing” with two decades’ commitment to Coach House Press (ca. 1970–1990). His editorial credits include the journal Brick, and the Long Poem Anthology (1979), among others.