The English Patient

This Booker prize winning novel and Oscar-laden silver screen counterpart will whisk you away on a journey to a different time and place. Set in post-war 1945 in a rundown Italian monastery in Florence a burned beyond-recognition patient is tended to by Hana, a young nurse. Flashing between Italy and Northern Africa and the unknown patient’s passionate love for a woman named Katherine Clifton, the layered narrative calls for slow reading, savouring Ondaatje’s beautiful ambiguous prose while you unearth the identity and terrifying secrets of the burned English patient.