BOOKER PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The bestselling author of Warlight traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. "A rare spellbinding web of dreams." --Time
The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions--and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions--and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
