Another novel set in a wartime hospital, winning the Booker the year after Regeneration. Four damaged people find themselves and each other in an Italian villa being used as a field hospital at the end of the second world war. The English patient, László Almásy – who is in fact not English – knows that he is dying. As he sinks and surfaces on morphine, he tells the story of his affair with a married Englishwoman in north Africa. There is no prospect of physical healing, for Almásy nor, by the time the atomic bombs have fallen at the end, for the world, but narrative has belated and secondary consolations of its own.