The English Patient Summary

In the aftermath of World War II, Hana, a young nurse, finds herself on her own in a villa nestled in the war-ravaged Italian countryside. She tends to an unidentified, critically injured man, whose body is heavily burnt from a plane crash. His only identifiable trait being his English manner of speech, she calls him the English patient. Amidst the dangerous landscape littered with German mines, Hana reads to him, tends her garden, and tries to restore the villa. Their solitude is interrupted by the arrival of Caravaggio, a family friend who also happens to be a former thief. His hands have been mutilated in the war, making him reliant on morphine. Despite his addiction, he manages to bond with Hana over their shared past and grief for her father, who was killed in the war.

Another character joins this eccentric group when two soldiers come upon Hana playing the piano. One of them is Kip, an Indian Sikh trained to defuse bombs, who has come to ensure the villa isn't booby-trapped. Kip and the English patient find common ground in their knowledge of explosives and soon become friends. Kip sets up camp in the villa's garden, becoming an integral part of their makeshift family. His feelings for Hana develop into romance, making their lives in the villa a bit less bleak. However, his job involves daily peril as he works to clear bombs around the town and bury fallen comrades.

The English patient, whose real name is revealed to be Almasy, starts sharing his past. Before the war, he had been a desert explorer and cartographer in North Africa. A complicated love triangle formed during a desert expedition with a young couple, Geoffrey and Katharine Clifton. This ended in a plane crash, Geoffrey's death, and Katharine being left behind, injured in the desert by Almasy. When Almasy failed to rescue her and ended up imprisoned by the English under suspicion of espionage, it led to his work for the Germans and eventually his own plane crash, leaving him unrecognizable. This revelation confirms Caravaggio's suspicions about the English patient's true identity and nationality. The narrative later shifts to Kip’s backstory and his decision to serve in the British army despite his brother's distrust of the west. Kip's stay at the villa ends abruptly when he hears about the atomic bombing of Japan and leaves in a fit of rage, only to later settle down as a doctor in India. Despite his new life, he often finds himself thinking about Hana.