Aspiring writer Sterling is arrested one morning, without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling – with the help of their three best friends – must defy bullfighters, football legends, spaceships, and Google Earth tourists in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka’s The Trial written for the era of gaslighting, a surreal inquiry into the very real effects of state violence and coercion on gender-nonconforming, working-class, and Black bodies. Following the Goldsmiths Prize-nominated We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner’s latest novel celebrates friendship, ingenuity, collective defiance, and an expanded notion of Britishness which centres the nation’s immigrants and so-called colonial subjects.