They are joined by two other characters, one being David Caravaggio, a thief and a long-time friend of Hana’s father and the other being Kip, a bomb disposal expert who volunteers to try and clear the villa of unexploded ordnance. She sees him as saint-like and falls in love with his pure nature. When the hospital is abandoned, Hana resolutely refuses to leave, staying with her patient. She reads Herodotus’s The Histories to him, which is his only possession. She washes his wounds, she provides him with much needed morphine and she reads to him. From that moment on she invests all of her energy into caring for a severely burned man, the English Patient. When her father gets killed in action Hana has an emotional breakdown. Her boyfriend, a Canadian officer, is killed and Hana comes to believe that she is cursed and that those around her are doomed to die. During the Italian campaign Villa San Girolamo functioned as a military hospital and one of the nurses there is Canadian army nurse Hana. The story is set against the historical background of World War Two.
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