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  • Published: 2 July 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241248300
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

The Trial




Kafka's gripping work of psychological horror

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

  • Published: 2 July 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241248300
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

About the author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.

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Praise for The Trial

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 García Márquez