The Trial, written in 1914–15 and published posthumously in 1925, is Franz Kafka’s most fully realized novel. It follows Josef K., a respectable bank official who is arrested one morning without explanation and must navigate an labyrinthine and utterly opaque legal system that seems to pervade every aspect of society. The Trial is the supreme literary document of bureaucratic absurdity, institutional power, and the individual’s helplessness before systems that refuse to be understood.
Kafka never finished the novel, yet its power is undiminished — The Trial has become one of the defining texts of twentieth-century literature, giving the language the adjective “Kafkaesque.” Download this free public-domain English-language EPUB to read one of literature’s great nightmares.
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