Excavating Kafka
By James Hawes
Quercus £14.99, 272 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

The well-used adjective “Kafkaesque” remains a suggestive one, even to those who have never read a single sentence of Franz Kafka’s works. Kafka’s name has become a journalistic cliché, calculated to evoke nightmares, injustice, the perversions of bureaucracy, surrealism, mental breakdown and the uncanny.