The Trial is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.

With its vast range of meatless dishes, Mediterranean food is fresh and light, and Claudia Roden aims to communicate the pleasure of cooking and eating the Mediterranean way. This is a collection of 30 recipes, including tunisian grilled mixed salad, Sicilian pasta with artichokes, Spanish mushroom soup with almond and garlic picada, and Greek squid in wine sauce to name but a few. They have been collected from regions of France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria and the Lebanon, and are divided into chapters on different kinds of dishes. Claudia Roden has included only those dishes that she has enjoyed the most, and that have proved the most popular with family and friends. Some are classics, and others are recently discovered regional dishes.