Books like The Trial
Loved The Trial by Franz Kafka? Here are 7 books with the same pull, and why each one fits.
About The Trial →7 books
- 1The Stranger
The Stranger
Albert CamusA man is condemned by a legal system for an act whose meaning he cannot fully explain, in a novel about the absurd and the failure of ordinary moral categories.
- 2Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George OrwellA man is pursued by an unaccountable state whose offices, charges and rules shift without explanation, which makes it a natural companion to The Trial's picture of institutional power.
Books like it → - 3The Man Without Qualities
The Man Without Qualities
Robert MusilA Viennese bureaucrat drifts through a city of officials and ideas in a long, digressive novel that treats modern life as a puzzle without a clear centre.
Books like it → - 4Bartleby, the Scrivener
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman MelvilleA copyist in a Wall Street office refuses to do what is asked of him, and the story's flat, bureaucratic tone shows the same unease with office life as Kafka's novel.
- 5The Street of Crocodiles
The Street of Crocodiles
Bruno SchulzA set of linked stories set in a provincial Central European town, full of dreamlike logic, fathers who seem to have strange powers and a surreal sense of everyday life.
- 6Blindness
Blindness
José SaramagoA city is overtaken by a sudden epidemic and its authorities respond with rules and cruelty, in a novel that asks how ordinary people behave when institutions fail them.
- 7The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum
Günter GrassA boy refuses to grow up in a Germany of war and bureaucratic compromise, and the novel's grotesque, satirical manner is rooted in the same German-language tradition as Kafka's.
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