Where to start with Franz Kafka

Czech novelist, 1883–1924.

Best Franz Kafka book to start with: The Trial (1925), on 5 of the 11 lists it could have made.

The Trial is the lists’ choice, but The Metamorphosis is the easier first Kafka. It is a novella, it is finished, and you can read it in an evening. A travelling salesman wakes to find himself changed into an enormous insect, and the story follows how his family and his employer respond.

In The Trial, the lists’ favourite, a bank clerk is arrested one morning and never told what he has done. Kafka left it unfinished, and you can feel that in the later chapters, but the first half is among the strangest and most gripping things he wrote.

The Castle is also unfinished. A land surveyor arrives in a village and tries to reach the officials who summoned him. It is the longest and the slowest, so read it last. Kafka wrote in German, so a sample page of the translation is worth reading before you buy.