The Trial

Josef K is thirty years old. He lives in rented accommodation in a large town and works for a bank. One day, although he has done nothing wrong, he is arrested. Two guards appear and start to intimidate him. He is not told the nature of the charge. And so begins a nightmare of successive scenes an irregular magistrates office, a bizarre court appearance, his arresting guards being flogged Franz Kafka began this piercing vision of state control versus the individual in 1914 and, finished by a friend after his death, it became one of the most prescient and influential novels of the 20th century.