The English Patient
The English Patient is a novel by Michael Ondaatje which deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned man, his Canadian nurse, a thief, and a British Army sapper as they live out the end of World War II in an Itallian monastery.
The novel won the Booker Prize in 1993 and the 1992 Governor General's Awards for fiction.
It has been translated into 30 languages.
A film version was released in 1996 starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas,Juliette Binoche, and Willem Dafoe directed by Anthony Minghella. It won 9 Academy Awards including Best Picture.
One of the main characters, the burned man, is count László Almásy, a famous hungarian researcher of the desert Sahara, explorer of the prehistoric rock painting sites in the Uweinat mountains (but the character appearing in the film, played by Ralph Fiennes, is fictional, there are serious differences between the real count and the figure portrayed in the film).
