Novel by Michael Ondaatje in the magic realist tradition. Tells the story of a mysterious, possibly-English, badly-burned patient, and those whose lives he crosses or has crossed. The story is set in Cairo and North Africa in the 1930s and the second world war, and later in Italy during the allied push north. (What terribly bad syntax.) Also the title of a film adaptation of the book by Anthony Minghella starring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas.