Hana tends to a badly burned, unidentified patient alone at the Villa San Girolamo after the rest of her medical unit departs.

Hana plays hopscotch alone in the darkened villa hallway, using chalk and a piece of metal to draw squares on the stone floor.

Caravaggio, a former thief and old friend of Hana's father, arrives at the villa with heavily bandaged hands.

Two British sappers, Kip and Hardy, enter the villa while Hana plays the piano during a thunderstorm.

Kip sets up his tent in the villa garden and begins spending his days defusing unexploded German bombs across the surrounding countryside.

The English patient tells Hana he fell burning from a crashed plane and was rescued by Bedouins who nursed him back to health.

The English patient tells Hana about Geoffrey and Katharine Clifton joining the North African desert expedition as a newly married couple.

Katharine reads aloud from The Histories at a desert campfire and the English patient falls in love with her voice.

The English patient and Katharine begin a secret affair in Cairo while her husband Geoffrey remains unaware.

Caravaggio administers a Brompton cocktail of morphine and alcohol to the English patient in order to loosen his account of the past.

Caravaggio reveals to Hana that the English patient is actually Count Almásy, a Hungarian explorer who guided German spies across the desert.

The four villa residents celebrate Hana's twenty-first birthday with wine, food, and oil-filled shells glowing on the outdoor terrace.

News of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki reaches the villa, sending Kip into a rage of grief and fury.

Kip forces his radio earphones onto the English patient, aims his rifle at him, then rides away from the villa on his motorbike.

Years later, Kip is a doctor with a family in India and Hana has returned to Canada, each still thinking of the other.

The novel opens with Hana, a young Canadian nurse, tending to a badly burned, unnamed man at an abandoned Italian villa after World War II ends in Europe. Their isolation is interrupted first by Caravaggio, a former thief who knew Hana's father, and then by Kip, an Indian sapper who camps in the garden and begins clearing the dangerous landscape of unexploded bombs. As Hana grows closer to the English patient, he reveals fragments of his past — his rescue by Bedouins, a desert affair with the married Katharine Clifton, and the sequence of events that left him burning in the wreckage of a plane. Caravaggio administers a narcotic cocktail to extract the patient's true identity, confirming he is the Hungarian count Almásy who guided German spies through the desert. The story reaches its rupture when news of the atomic bombs on Japan sends Kip into rage before he rides away, and the novel ends with each survivor returned to a separate life, still haunted by the others.

The headline events of the villa, the love affair, and the English patient's unmasking.

The English patient describes traveling with a Bedouin caravan, identifying European guns by touch and learning the customs of desert communities.

Hana decides to remain at the villa after her medical division leaves, refusing to abandon the English patient who cannot be moved.

Caravaggio recounts sneaking naked into a German officer's girlfriend's room to steal a camera that contained a photograph of him.

Caravaggio shows Hana his mutilated hands, revealing that Italian interrogators removed both of his thumbs during his captivity.

Hana confesses to Caravaggio in the library that she had an abortion during the war after the baby's father was killed.

Kip hoists an elderly Italian historian up on a pulley harness so the old man can view a fresco of the Queen of Sheba in a church at Arezzo.

Kip discovers and defuses a bomb concealed behind a window valence in the villa's library while Caravaggio watches from below.

Katharine tells the English patient she cannot continue their affair, warning that Geoffrey will go mad if he finds out the truth.

Geoffrey Clifton flies his plane directly at the English patient at Gilf Kebir, crashing into the dunes, killing himself and badly wounding Katharine.

The English patient carries the gravely wounded Katharine into the Cave of Swimmers and leaves her there with his copy of The Histories.

British soldiers at the El Taj oasis detain the English patient after he walks four days through the desert, refusing to believe his story about Katharine.

Lord Suffolk selects Kip for his elite experimental bomb disposal unit after Kip completes the entrance examination faster than any other applicant.

Lord Suffolk, his secretary Miss Morden, and his chauffeur Mr. Harts are all killed while attempting to defuse a bomb at Erith Marshes.

Hardy, Kip's second-in-command, is killed by a distant explosion on the same night the villa residents hold a small celebration.

Kip loses control of his motorbike on a wet bridge and plunges into the Ofanto River while riding south through Italy.

Behind the central story lie the personal histories that shaped each villa resident before they arrived. Hana's wartime trauma — her secret abortion, the deaths of those she loved, and her deliberate isolation — explains why she refuses to leave the English patient and why she has stopped writing to her stepmother Clara. Caravaggio's career as a spy-thief ended violently when Italian interrogators cut off his thumbs, leaving him addicted to morphine and stripped of the nerve that once defined him. Kip's story unfolds through his devotion to Lord Suffolk's bomb disposal unit, a family-like bond that is shattered when Suffolk and his companions are killed at Erith Marshes. The English patient's account of Katharine ending their affair, Geoffrey's suicidal crash, and the British soldiers who refused to rescue a dying woman together reveal how colonial bureaucracy and jealous betrayal cost Katharine her life. These secondary events supply the causes and context that make the main plot's grief intelligible.

The backstories and secondary moments that fill in the causes behind the main narrative.

During the war, Hana spontaneously cuts her hair short, severing her connection to her former self and the outside world.

Hana learns of her father Patrick's death and finds renewed purpose by deciding to devote herself entirely to the English patient.

Caravaggio confronts Kip in the dark villa and slaps him after accusing him of secretly tailing him through the grounds at night.

Hana stands in a mined field gripping two live wires steady while Kip defuses a trick bomb wired into a tree, refusing to leave despite his warnings.

Kip and Hana lie together beneath the tree after the bomb is defused, and she falls asleep on his chest while he stays awake, unsettled.

Hana walks through the dark garden to Kip's tent at night and the two become lovers for the first time.

Under the influence of the Brompton cocktail, the English patient admits he guided German spies across the desert in order to reach Katharine.

Oil leaking from Madox's rotting plane ignites and the English patient's body catches fire as he parachutes out over the desert.

Kip slides across the library floor and catches a falling fuse box before it hits the ground, saving Caravaggio's life in an instant.

The English patient recounts returning to the Cave of Swimmers in 1942 and finding Katharine's body in the corner where he had left her.

Caravaggio reveals that Geoffrey Clifton had secretly been working for British intelligence, tasked with spying on the Royal Geographical Society expeditions.

Madox, unable to bear a priest's nationalist pro-war sermon, shoots himself in the head in a crowded English church.

Kip remains alone in an evacuated Naples and lies down inside a church next to a tableau of religious figures, waiting to see if German bombs explode when the power is restored.

Caravaggio wraps Kip in a farewell embrace at the open villa gate, telling him he will have to learn how to miss him.

Hana writes her first letter to her stepmother Clara in years, saying she is sick of Europe and ready to come home.

The novel's most consequential moments are the quiet choices and sudden revelations that redirect each character's life. Hana severs herself from her past by cutting her hair and devoting herself to a dying stranger after her father's death, finding purpose in an act of stubborn care. The bond between Hana and Kip deepens through a series of charged encounters — gripping live wires in a mined field together, lying under a tree in the aftermath of crisis, and eventually becoming lovers — each moment built on a trust forged under the threat of death. Under the influence of morphine, the English patient's confessions crack open the central mystery: his choice to guide German spies, and Caravaggio's counter-revelation that Geoffrey Clifton had been a British spy all along, reframes every act of betrayal in the novel. Madox's suicide during a pro-war church sermon and Kip's anguished departure after the atomic bombings expose the violence that Western nationalism inflicts on those who tried to live beyond it. Together, these turning points show that every character is defined not by nationality or history but by the irreversible choices they made under the pressure of war and love.

The pivotal decisions and devastating discoveries that define each character's fate.