The Trial

'Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.' K., a successful bank official, is told he is under arrest but is allowed to go on with his life. No one will tell him what he is accused of. The court that judges him meets in the attics of poor tenement buildings, its officials are petty and corrupt, and everyone, from his lawyer to a painter who knows the judges, explains that acquittal is almost impossible. In the cathedral a priest tells him the parable of a man who waits all his life before the door of the Law.

Franz Kafka wrote the novel in 1914 and 1915 and never finished it; before his death he asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, but Brod published it in 1925. The word 'Kafkaesque' comes largely from this book. This translation is by David Wyllie. Kafka's best-known story is Metamorphosis.

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague into a German-speaking Jewish family, studied law and spent his working life as a conscientious official at an insurance institute for workers' accidents. He wrote at night, in a few intense bursts, and published only a handful of stories in his lifetime.

Dying of tuberculosis at forty, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts; Brod refused and published The Trial, The Castle and much more. Kafka's dreamlike stories of guilt, bureaucracy and isolation gave the world the word 'Kafkaesque', and few twentieth-century writers have been more influential.