“She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.” Set in an abandoned villa/hospital in Tuscany, The English Patient is a novel of four people maimed and broken by the war – A badly burnt and disfigured patient who is mistaken to be an English man but later identified as Count Almasy, the naive and simple nurse Hana who remained back in the villa(even when the rest of the staff left after the war) to take care of the English patient with whom she felt a special affinity, an Indian…