The Trial

  • Author Franz Kafka
  • Narrator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
  • Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
  • Run Time 8 hours and 7 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Classic fiction.
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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, winner of the 2019 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

Critics Review

  • The Dante of the Twentieth Century

    W. H. Auden

  • This compelling, prophetic novel anticipates the insanity of modern bureaucracy and the coming of totalitarianism

    The Daily Telegraph

  • It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing

    Albert Camus

  • It was Kafka who made me understand that one can write differently

    Gabriel García Márquez

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