Read The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Gregor Samsa wakes as an insect and his family adjusts; Kafka in sixty pages.

Prague under mechanical apartheid; the best level design in the series.

Josef K. is arrested for something nobody will name; the word Kafkaesque comes from here.

An idiot, or a genius, in the Austro-Hungarian army; the funniest book about a war.

A womanising Prague cellist is stuck with a five-year-old Russian boy in 1989.

Two girls named Marie decide to be as bad as the world; Vera Chytilova's anarchic collage.

A man learns he came to Wales on the Kindertransport and follows the trail back; Sebald with photographs.

Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.