Cirrus@Austlit

After twenty years of peacefully running one of the Empire’s settlements, a magistrate takes pity on an enemy barbarian who has been tortured. He enters into an awkward intimate relationship with her, and then is himself imprisoned as an enemy of the state.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a disturbing political fable about oppression, the fraught desire for reparation, and about living with a troubled conscience under an unjust regime.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

In 1899 the brilliant and urbane art collector, Karoly Pulszky, found his final refuge in Australia. His vision - to make his Fine Arts Museum in Budapest the most renowned in Europe - became an obsession which broke him, leading to the scandal that hounded him into exile.

Pulszky's is the story of glittering cosmopolitan society, of passion, pride and madness; of a man entangled in the political intrigues of his time. In telling it, Thomas Shapcott has woven fact and fiction, with subtle artistry, into the richly ambiguous texture of truth.