Endorsements for Lovers of Franz K.

“Did Max Brod commit a crime by not fulfilling Kafk a’s last will – to burn all his works? Burhan Sönmez is not a judge. He is only a scribe at the Last Judgment, recording the speeches of the parties. And he does his job brilliantly”
Mikhail Shiskin

“The kind of book that will enthral a student and intrigue an Oxford don, thrill a worker on the factory floor and captivate a lifelong reader of Kafka”
Lemn Sissay

“A gripping tale of idealism colliding with history and moral uncertainty”
Ava Homa, author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire

Reviews of Lovers of Franz K.

“Sönmez playfully expands Kafka’s world in a literary experiment that encourages readers to reimagine the unfinished work of their heroes.”
Natalie Perman, Financial Times

“Sönmez is really interested in the question of who owns literature. Was Brod right to publish? Would Kafka be unknown if he hadn’t? The dialogue-led approach makes the book punchy and fast-moving, and brings some surprising twists before the end.”
John Self, Guardian Best Recent Translated Fiction

“Burhan Sönmez’s unashamedly stagey thriller is a homage to Franz Kafka, framed as the trial (of course) of Ferdy Kaplan. He is accused of trying to shoot Max Brod, the executor who ignored Kafka’s wishes and published his works posthumously. Sonmez, a Kurdish novelist who is president of PEN, which campaigns for freedom of expression, queries how far one should go in the pursuit of what is important to us”
John Dugdale, The Times Best Thrillers of the Year so far

“This provocative novel confronts us with the question: who owns art?”
Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times Best Summer Books in Translation

“Brief and beguiling… What begins as a noirish police procedural, complete with sardonic dialogue and cigarette smoke curling beneath fluorescent lights, soon shifts into a story driven by ethical conundrum as much as by the apparatus of suspense… Still, the novella’s intellectual ambition never eclipses its narrative allure. Mr. Sönmez’s prose, gracefully spare in Mr. Hêzil’s translation, evocatively channels Kafk a himself, who hovers ghostlike over a trial in which Brod’s betrayal, Kaplan’s obsession and even readers’ own engagement with Kafka become part of the same continuum: a series of transgressions against Kafka’s writings”
Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal