Waiting for the Barbarians A Novel (Penguin Ink) [Paperback]

A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

Waiting for the Barbarians centers on the crisis of the conscience of the Magistrate—a loyal servant of the Empire working in a tiny frontier town, doing his best to ignore an inevitable war with the barbarians. After he witnesses the cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war, he reconsiders his role in the regime and carries out a quixotic act of rebellion.

Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall,Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra, and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee'sWaiting for the Barbariansto the big screen. A real literary event —Irving Howe,The New York Times Book Review(front-page review)

I have known few authors who can evoke such a wilderness in the heart of a man.... Mr. Coetzee knows the elusive terror of Kafka. —Bernard Levin, The Sunday Times(London)

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction includeDusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and theLife and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir,Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and TheIrish TimesInternational Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Pril³q