US Army Staff Sergeant Will James, Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge comprise the Bravo Company's bomb disposal unit stationed in Baghdad. James is the tech team leader. When he arrives on the scene, Bravo Company has thirty-nine days left on its current deployment, and it will be a long thirty-nine days for Sanborn and Eldridge whose styles do not mesh with that of their new leader. James' thrill of the dismantlement seems to be...

At the end of World War II, a mysterious, horribly burned man who claims not to remember his name, known only as the "English patient," lies near death in an Italian villa. He is cared for by a quietly desperate young nurse, Hana, herself a victim of the war. With her at the villa are Kip, a young Sikh bomb-disposal expert, and a shadowy thief with bandaged hands named Caravaggio. The key to the burned man's past may lie in his commonplace book,...