The Institute

By: Jakub Zulczyk

Narrated by: Esther Wane

Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's Summary

The residents of an apartment block in Central Krakow are trapped in their own building. All windows and doors are sealed, phone lines are down and the internet is off. Seven people, cut off from the world.

It quickly turns out that they are participating in a strange game played by the mysterious ‘THEY’. Suspicions are cast, and conflicts break out. Paranoia thickens. Until finally, blood is shed.

The Institute is a compelling suspenseful thriller and an uncomfortable and troubling study of the most primal of instincts: fear.

©2021 Jakub Zulczyk (P)2021 W F Howes

Awful!

It’s a long time since I’ve had to make myself finish a book and I would have abandoned it an hour or so in if I hadn’t read the other reviews and thought, ‘well, it obviously gets better’. Sadly not. I didn’t find one single character that I could say I liked or was rooting for. For me, it was a pointless meander through descriptions of smoking, chain smoking, smoking weed, getting drunk, being promiscuous, with some utterly pointless violence thrown in. One reviewer describes it as a conspiracy story; the only conspiracy for me is how the synopsis and 5* reviews conspired to make me waste a credit. I won’t be reading anything else from this author.

Fabulous conspiracy thriller

I love a good conspiracy and this book hits the mark nicely.

Who are 'They'? Who indeed is anybody in this story? The main character, Agnieszka is a woman in her thirties whose grandmother has recently died and left her a large apartment in Krakow, this is nicely timed as Agnieszka is in an unhappy marriage and is determined to leave her drunken husband and set up somewhere safe where she hopes, in time, to bring her daughter if she can ever prise her away from the clutches of her husband's family.

Agnieszka takes a job in a bar, makes some friends who end up sharing her large apartment. That story in itself is quite traumatic involving much stress and shouting. The story after the apartment is sealed off becomes far more tense and much more stressful. It is not long before characters start dying off, and the stress really builds to a nasty crescendo.

I loved it.