The English Patient: Winner of the Golden Man Booker Prize - Tapa blanda

The English Patient wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening (Toni Morrison)

All the allure of early twentieth-century desert exploration is contained in Ondaatje's beautiful, spare narrative . A wise and graceful book about history itself, both the events that are its raw material and the human values that shape it (Sunday Times)

Language of such riveting beauty that one is made to stop and stare (Observer)

One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time (Guardian)

The best piece of fiction in English I've read in years (Independent on Sunday)

Ondaatje has now written the extraordinary novel we have been awaiting from him: The English Patient is a masterpiece (Financial Times)

An extraordinary novel-poetic, philosophical, moving . The English Patient has such a strange beauty that it requires and repays a reader's act of faith. It is such a thought-provoking piece of writing that one if forced to consider its achievement (Daily Telegraph)

An exotic, consuming and richly inspired novel of passion. In its elegance and its satisfactions it resembles no book I know (Richard Ford)

Feats of daring espionage, aeroplanes mysteriously buried beneath desert sand, archaeological exploration in the Sahara and nail-biting accounts of bomb-disposal against a nervous clock . this is the real thing: muscular, resonant, alive (Spectator)

In descriptive prose of spectacular beauty, he invents a desert world which is both physical and imaginative. This is one of the few truly great post-war novels (Irish Times)