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.

'Everyone in Port Lincoln thinks Snook Pascoe is a loser. People joke about his clumsiness; his teacher ridicules him and even his father, skipper of the tuna boat Blue Fin, is convinced that Snook will never amount to anything. After all, tuna fishing is a hard life for ‘real men’.

'When Snook is allowed, for once, to sail on Blue Fin he faces a terrifying disaster. A waterspout engulfs the ship, the deck is swept clean, the radio and rudder are wrecked, the engine is disabled, the crew is lost overboard and Snook’s father lies unconscious down below. Snook is on his own, far out to sea…' (Publication summary)