The Complete Novels

Three unfinished novels. Three labyrinths. Three visions of the same nightmare: a world of absolute authority, impenetrable procedure, and the total bewilderment of the individual who finds themselves caught within it.

In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested one morning without being told his crime and spends the novel trying to navigate a legal system that is everywhere and comprehensible to no one. In The Castle, a land surveyor arrives in a village to begin work and finds himself indefinitely suspended, unable to reach the authorities who may or may not have summoned him. In Amerika, a sixteen-year-old boy arrives in New York to find the New World as labyrinthine and arbitrary as everything Kafka ever imagined.

Together in this single Vintage volume, Kafka’s three novels define one of literature’s most distinctive and influential visions — the Kafkaesque — with a precision, a dark humour, and a metaphysical intensity that has lost nothing in the century since they were written. For anyone who has ever felt lost, overlooked, or trapped in a system designed for someone else: this is your bible. Published by Vintage.