"In the final days of World War II, four damaged lives converge in an abandoned Italian villa that is riddled with undetonated bombs the Germans have left behind and with the potentially explosive secrets of its current inhabitants. Hana, a grieving Canadian nurse; Caravaggio, a maimed former thief; and Kip, an emotionally detached Indian sapper--all three are haunted in different ways by the man they know as 'the English patient,' a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. It is this man's incandescent memories--of the bleak North African desert, of explorers' caves and Bedouin tribesmen, of forbidden love, and of annihilating anger--that illuminate the story, and the consequences of the mysteries they reveal radiate outward in shock waves that leave all the characters forever changed"--Dust jacket flap.