The recap
In the last months of the Second World War, a young Canadian nurse named Hana refuses to leave an abandoned villa in the Italian hills, its rooms and gardens still hiding unexploded bombs, where she cares for a single patient burned beyond recognition. He is believed to be English, will not or cannot say who he is, and talks instead about the desert. Two more wounded souls drift into the villa: Caravaggio, a thief turned spy, and Kip, a Sikh sapper whose job is defusing bombs. As the patient's memories surface, they lead back to Cairo in the 1930s, to explorers mapping the desert and to a consuming affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton. Ondaatje writes in luminous fragments that shift like sand, moving between past and present and from one consciousness to another. The love stories here, old and new, are tender, dangerous and shaped by war, and the novel reads like a long, beautiful act of remembering.
Why read it
For readers who like poetic, layered novels that reward slow reading, and for anyone moved by love stories set against the wreckage of war.
Fun facts
- 01
It shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, the two novels tying for first place.
- 02
In 2018 a public vote named it the Golden Man Booker, the best of the prize's first fifty years of winners, although Ondaatje said he did not believe for a second that his book was the best.
- 03
The 1996 film adaptation, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, won nine Academy Awards.
