Karl Rossmann, a sixteen-year-old German boy, is sent away by his family after a scandal and arrives in New York by ship. Full of hope, he tries to make a place for himself in a vast and bewildering new country. He meets a wealthy uncle, hotel workers, drifters and others, and finds that fortune and friendship can change quickly. The novel, unfinished and published after Kafka's death, is lighter and more adventurous than his other long works, though it shares their sense of an innocent person at the mercy of impersonal forces. It offers a strange, dreamlike vision of America.