Ranked #8 in South Africa, Ranked #20 in African — see more rankings.
Reviews and Recommendations
We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Waiting for the Barbarians from the world's leading experts.
Imraan Coovadia Waiting for the Barbarians was the Coetzee book that I was always most attached to – I think it’s the Coetzee book that most South Africans are attached to. Coetzee takes the mood of the 1980s state of emergency – when people were being detained and disappearing and there was a fear of communist or black madness on the borders – and he makes it more interesting by creating this partial allegory of some unnamed empire. The whole point of the book is contained in the title. It’s a bit like The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s a book you can’t imagine with a different title. It’s about a... (Source)