A Country Doctor

A Country Doctor is a short story by Franz Kafka, written in 1917. It centers on a country doctor who is called out on a winter night to attend a sick patient, and from that simple starting point Kafka builds a story that feels unsettling and strange. The setting is ordinary enough, but the situation quickly slips into an absurd, dreamlike register, so the story is less about plot than about pressure, confusion, and the sense that events are moving beyond the doctor’s control.

This book fits readers who like short fiction that is compact, uneasy, and a little surreal. It works well if you want Kafka in a concentrated form: a story built around one urgent errand, but one that opens into a much broader feeling of dislocation. If you are drawn to sparse, tense stories where the mood matters as much as the action, this is a natural place to start.