Titel en schrijver

ISBN nr.

Uitgeverij, drukjaar en drukversie

Paperback of hardcover

Aantal pagina’s

Taal en categorie

Korte samenvatting

The story is set against the historical background of World War Two. During the Italian campaign Villa San Girolamo functioned as a military hospital and one of the nurses there is Canadian army nurse Hana. Her boyfriend, a Canadian officer, is killed and Hana comes to believe that she is cursed and that those around her are doomed to die. When her father gets killed in action Hana has an emotional breakdown. From that moment on she invests all of her energy into caring for a severely burned man, the English Patient.

She washes his wounds, she provides him with much needed morphine and she reads to him. She reads Herodotus’s The Histories to him, which is his only possession. When the hospital is abandoned, Hana resolutely refuses to leave, staying with her patient. She sees him as saint-like and falls in love with his pure nature. They are joined by two other characters, one being David Caravaggio, a thief and a long-time friend of Hana’s father and the other being Kip, a bomb disposal expert who volunteers to try and clear the villa of unexploded ordnance.

Through the memories of the Allied African campaign of the burned man, they try to find out who he really is.

Over de auteur

He has published 13 books of poetry and seven novels. For ‘The Collected Works of Billy the Kid’ (1970) and for ‘There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems 1973–1978’ (1979) he won the Governor General’s Award. For his novel ‘Anil’s Ghost’ (2000) he won the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Canada’s Governor General’s Award.

The novel ‘The English Patient’ (1992) won the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize and the Governor General’s Award. As a film, this novel won the Academy Award for Best Picture and multiple other awards. The novel ‘Skin of a Lion’ (1987), about early immigrants in Toronto, won the 1988 City of Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the 1987 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for best novel of the year in English, and the winner of the first Canada Reads competition in 2002. ‘Coming Through Slaughter’ (1976), won the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award. ‘Divisadero’, Ondaatje’s 2007 novel, won the 2007 Governor General’s Award.

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