A modern classic, this superb book published in 1992 was turned into a great movie in 1996 directed by Anthony Minghella, who also wrote the screenplay. To quote from the Audible notes:

With unsettling beauty and intelligence, this Golden Man Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II.

The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the centre of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions – and whose memories of suffering, rescue and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

It is a marvellous book that loses nothing from being converted into an audiobook. Jennifer Ehle’s superb quiet but compelling narration is at times really quite haunting, adding a new dimension to an already excellent tale.

Highly recommended.