The Trial – Franz Kafka

"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested."

Josef K., a bank officer, is arrested by unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. He is forced to navigate a nightmarish legal system where the laws are unknown, the judges are inaccessible, and the proceedings are endless. He struggles to prove his innocence to a court that assumes his guilt.

The Trial is the definitive novel of the modern bureaucratic nightmare. It portrays a world stripped of logic and justice, where the individual is crushed by an invisible, omnipotent authority.