Karolina Watroba says she finds the best way to understand a writer is to understand their readers. This explains the thinking behind her open-ended exploration of Franz Kafka. Sometimes in her brisk and lively study, she alights on the author himself: his letters to lovers, his travels beyond Prague and his novels such as The Trial, The Castle and The Metamorphosis. But she is just as likely to free-associate her way from Brexit to Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins, the Prague Spring, tourist souvenirs, Haruki Murakami and AI. Rarely does she dwell on any topic for long before some other Kafka connection catches her attention, his continuing resonance with everything and everyone from software companies to South Korean novelists seeming to prove his artistic worth.

As the centenary of Kafka’s death approaches, she focuses on those times and places where the writer has spoken most loudly to us. ‘As the coronavirus pandemic rages around the world, one text in particular seems to come into its own,’ Watroba writes, thinking about The Metamorphosis. Indeed, readers in Glasgow will recall that the last Scottish theatre production to open before lockdown was an adaptation of The Metamorphosis by Vanishing Point, with a cast including actors from Italy where the pandemic was in full swing. The show was prophetic in its vision of characters which, she writes, were ‘held captive by the fragility of their own bodies’.

That Watroba quotes my own review of the show only adds to the Kafkaesque circularity as I now write about her book in turn. Kafka’s writing, she argues, is unusually open to interpretation, the disorientation flummoxing some readers and enchanting others. He is not an easy read, but in difficult times he reflects our sense of alienation. Bright, accessible and chatty, Watroba’s book holds Kafka up to the light to reveal fragments of his elliptical appeal.

Karolina Watroba: Metamorphoses – In Search of Franz Kafka is published by Profile Books on Thursday 2 May.