The European theater of the war has just ended with the Germans retreating up the Italian countryside. He was trained as a bomb defuser under Lord Suffolk, a true English gentleman, and was then virtually welcomed into an English family. He worked for the Germans, helping their spies make their way across the desert into Cairo. When he meets Hana, he uses her to once again connect to humanity. Finally, in 1938, Katharine broke off their affair, telling Almasy that Geoffrey would go mad if he ever found out.

That was the point at which the Bedouins found him and cared for his burns.Little by little, the English patient tells this whole story. Almasy parachuted down from the plane, his body covered in flames. Though there is no single narrator, the story is alternatively seen from the point of view of each of the main characters. After hearing the piano, Kip has come to clear the villa of bombs, knowing that the Germans frequently booby-trapped musical instruments. Almasy fell in love with Katherine, and they began an affair, which Katherine finally broke off.

The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of World War II. Although their affair was over, Almasy remained haunted by her, and he tried to punish her for hurting him by being particularly mean to her in public. The novel opens with Hana, a young nurse, gardening outside a villa in Italy in 1945. The explorers, Almasy, and the Cliftons got along very well. He becomes enraged, knowing that a western country would never commit such an atrocity against another white country. The English Patient: Novel Summary The epigraph is taken from the minutes of the Geographical Society meeting of November 194- and refers to the death of Geoffrey Clifton at Gilf Kebir and the disappearance of his wife in 1939. The plane missed Almasy, but the crash killed Geoffrey, left Katharine severely injured, and left them with no way to escape the desert. The narrative structure intersperses descriptions of present action with thoughts and conversations that offer glimpses of past events and occurrences.

The plane malfunctioned during their flight and caught fire.
Kip makes camp in the garden of the villa and becomes a part of the "family" that now exists there. They soon began a torrid and tumultuous affair. He takes his gun and threatens to kill the English patient, whom he sees as a symbol of the West. Without transportation, he walked to the cave to get Katharine. Please stand by, while we are checking your browser...Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass.

Though he is happy and fulfilled in his new life, he often wonders about Hana.SparkNotes is brought to you by Barnes & Noble.Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.

Although Kip's brother always distrusted the west, Kip went willingly to serve in the British army. They lost him between Cairo and the plane crash, and now, of course, he is unrecognizable.The focus of the novel shifts to Kip, and we are told his entire story. Lord Suffolk and his group were blown up defusing a bomb, and Kip decided to leave England and become a sapper in Italy.Kip has felt emotionally removed from everyone in his job as a sapper. As the Germans retreated, they left hidden bombs and mines everywhere, so the landscape is particularly dangerous. Geoffrey owned a plane, which the party found especially useful in helping to map the desert.

Although the other nurses and patients have left the villa to escape to a safer place, Hana decides to stay in the villa with her patient.Hana does not know much about the man for whom she cares. They tortured him and cut off his thumbs, leaving his hands mutilated and nearly useless. Kip's job is extremely dangerous. The four main characters are: an unrecognisably burned man — the eponymous patient, presumed to be English; his Canadian Army nurse, a Sikh British Army sapper, and a Canadian thief. In the villa, he reminisces with Hana and mourns with her over the death of her father in the war.As Hana plays the piano in the library, two soldiers come in and stand alongside while she plays. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the,Please complete the security check to access.


When August comes, however, Kip hears on the radio of the atomic bomb that the United States has dropped on Japan. Years later, he is a doctor in India with a family of his own.

He is an old family friend of Hana's father, Patrick, and had heard about her location while he was recovering in a hospital a few miles away. He tells her that the Germans caught him after an attempt to steal a camera from a woman's room.

He does not know who they were, but he feels grateful to them nonetheless. Everywhere they stole glances and moments, and they were obsessed with each other. To pass the time, Hana reads to the English patient—she assumes he is English by his manner and speech—and also gardens, fixes up the villa, and plays hopscotch. The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. He walked across the desert for four days until he reached the nearest town, but when he got there, the English army would not help him get back to Katharine.

The story occurs during the North African Campaignand centres on the incremental revelations of the patient's actions prior to his injuries, and the emotional eff… In 1936, an Oxford man who owned a plane, Geoffrey Clifton, and his wife, Katherine, joined him, and they got on well. Along with his fellow European counterparts, Almasy knew every inch of the desert and made many trips across it. They knew Almasy had started helping the Germans and planned to kill him in the desert. After he left Cairo, his truck broke down in the desert.