The woman, Hana, is suffering from shell shock and had refused to leave the villa on account of her patient, a badly burned amnesiac presumed to be English. He hears a group of doctors talking about a nurse and her patient in a villa to the north and stops to ask her name.

The structure itself has endured countless mortar strikes, and bombs and mines litter the property, making many of the room unsafe to enter.Ī man with bandaged hands named Caravaggio has been at the military hospital in Rome for nearly four months now. The villa has been nearly destroyed by the war.

When the other nurses and doctors moved the patients north, Hana insisted on staying behind with the English patient, who is not stable enough to move. The Italian villa had served as a makeshift hospital for the Allies. It is the final days of World War II, and they are the villa’s only residents. Selected from the villa’s library, Hana reads various books to the English patient, including his own copy of Herodotus’s The Histories. He had fallen flaming from the sky, he says, and the Bedouin, a native tribe of desert Arabs, saved his life and carried him out of the desert. As Hana works, the man, known only as the English patient, tells her a story about the desert. She bathes him every four days, dripping water onto his open and weeping wounds. In the bed is a badly burned man, and he turns to look at Hana as she enters the room. She walks through the kitchen and up the dark stairs to a back bedroom that is painted like a garden. Hana stands up in the garden near the orchard of a villa and heads in the direction of the house.

The english patient 1992