Top ten hospital stories

Sarah Moss' new novel is Bodies of Light.

One of the author's top ten hospital novels, as shared at the Guardian:

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

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.

Read about another entry on the list.

The English Patient also made Robert Allison's top ten list of novels of desert war, Joel Cunningham's list of sixteen book-to-movie adaptations that won Academy Awards, Pico Iyer's top five list of books on crossing cultures, John Mullan's list of ten of the best deserts in literature and Jane Ciabattari's list of five masterpiece stories that worked as films.

--Marshal Zeringue