The English Patient is a richly textured book which movingly explores many of the broad issues of war—the pain, loss, sense of betrayal, quiet heroism, mixed allegiances and its effect on the heart and psyche—by focusing closely on four very different individuals who find themselves together at a deserted, halfdestroyed villa north of Florence in the final weeks of World War II. Twentyyear-old Hana, an allied nurse on the Italian front who has seen the carnage of war on a daily basis, decides not to go with her unit when it leaves the makeshift little hospital in the Villa San Girolamo to move to safer quarters in the south. She will no longer face the daily procession of critically wounded young men who are brought to the hospital only to die in front of her. Emotionally exhausted, she stays and devotes herself...