The English Patient

A masterpiece * Financial Times *
Magnificent * Sunday Times *
Extraordinary * Daily Telegraph *
The English Patient wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening -- Toni Morrison
Language of such riveting beauty that one is made to stop and stare * Observer *
One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time * Guardian *
The best piece of fiction in English I’ve read in years * Independent on Sunday *
An exotic, consuming and richly inspired novel of passion. In its elegance and its satisfactions it resembles no book I know -- Richard Ford
Feats of daring espionage, aeroplanes mysteriously buried beneath desert sand, archaeological exploration in the Sahara and nail-biting accounts of bomb-disposal against a nervous clock … this is the real thing: muscular, resonant, alive * Spectator *
In descriptive prose of spectacular beauty, he invents a desert world which is both physical and imaginative. This is one of the few truly great post-war novels * Irish Times *
A magic carpet of a novel that soars across worlds and times … As rare and spellbinding net of dreams as any that has emerged in recent years * Time *
In this masterful novel Ondaatje weaves a beautiful and light-handed prose through the histories of people caught up in love and war. A rich and compelling work of fiction -- Don DeLillo
Ondaatje is one of North America’s finest novelists … the spell of his haunted villa remains with us, inviting us to reread passages for the pure pleasures of being there * Wall Street Journal *
A tale of many pleasures--an intensely theatrical tour de force but grounded in Michael Ondaatje's strong feeling for distant times and places * New York Times Book Review *
It is an adventure, mystery, romance, and philosophical novel in one ... Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet * Chicago Tribune *
Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic, it transports the reader to another world … Ondaatje’s most probing examination yet of the nature of identity * San Francisco Chronicle *
A novel so compelling that you will likely read it as I did, in a single sitting. But it’s also one of those rare novels with so much poetry and lucidity that you will find yourself reading it a second and third time, savouring it beauty and intelligence for weeks … The English Patient is simply one of the best novels I have read in years -- Russell Banks