This joint winner of the 1992 Booker Prize takes place as the Second World War is ending It explores the lives of four people, a young woman and three men, stranded in a damaged villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them In an upstairs room lies the badly burned English patient, alive but unable to move His extraordinary adventures and turbulent love affair in the North African desert before the War provide the focus around which the vivid tales of his companions revolve