The Trial

Description

Kafka's gripping work of psychological horror. Translated with an introduction by Idris Parry. 'Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong' Josef K., an ordinary bank clerk, is accused of a crime he did not commit, whose nature is never revealed to him. As he tries to defend his innocence amid a labyrinthine world of anonymous bureaucrats, stifling courtrooms and casual brutality, he becomes increasingly uncertain of his fate and spirals towards destruction. Kafka's gripping, unnerving parable about the nature of terror and the futility of human life is at once nightmarish and chillingly real.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born of Jewish parents in Prague. Several of his story collections were published in his lifetime and his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, were published posthumously by his editor Max Brod.

The Dante of the Twentieth Century -- W. H. Auden This compelling, prophetic novel anticipates the insanity of modern bureaucracy and the coming of totalitarianism -- The Daily Telegraph It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing -- Albert Camus It was Kafka who made me understand that one can write differently -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez