Set against the atmosphere of late–Cold War Europe, Waiting for War follows a group of characters caught in the psychological condition implied by the title. Catastrophe may arrive at any moment, and yet life continues in a suspended, almost theatrical calm.

Personal relationships, political anxieties, and private obsessions drift together as the characters attempt to interpret signals from a world that feels perpetually on the verge of conflict. The result is a tense, quietly philosophical novel about paranoia, expectation, and the cultural mood of a continent accustomed to living in the shadow of war.

Written in the early 1990s—when the ideological structures of the Cold War were collapsing but its psychological residue remained—the book reads as a portrait of a society unsure whether the future will bring relief or disaster.