The English Patient tells the story of four very different individuals who find themselves living together in abandoned villa in Northern Italy in the final months of World War II. Hana, a young Canadian nurse, has stayed behind at the villa (previously used as an improvised hospital) to care for the badly burned titular “English Patient,” who is also suffering from amnesia.

On her deathbed, popular historian and journalist Claudia Hampton decides to write “a history of the world,” which turns out to be a kaleidoscopic reflection on her own life, going back and forth in time anchored around the loss of the great love of her life, a soldier called Tom who she meets in 1942 Egypt. The titular “moon tiger” is a mosquito repellant device, “a green coil that slowly burns all night… dropping away into lengths of grey ash” - present at a pivotal (and ultimately, final) moment in her relationship with Tom, and its “glowing red eye” is a light that she’s unable to look away from, returning to it time and again throughout the novel.