The Trial

'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. 'It offers everything and confirms nothing.' Albert Camus 'Irresistibly compelling . . . has the sheen of a wide-awake, hyper-real and terrifyingly definite experience . . . we know this courtroom, these corridors, these airless overheated spaces.' John Banville Translated with an introduction by Idris Parry