Strong narrative, Hitchcockian suspense, fully authentic language.

The Institute is an amalgamate of three genres: horror, thriller and a novel of manners. The intrigue presented in it is only a pretext to portray a panorama of a generation of people in their thirties, their unfulfilled aspirations, their attitude towards the surrounding reality, their escape from responsibility and the way they fight social stereotypes. It is also a book about the subconscious divisions into “us” and “them” and about the need to define oneself through finding an enemy.

The main character is a woman called Agnieszka (35) who leaves her husband, moves from Warsaw to Krakow and fights to reassume custody of her 12-years old daughter. Agnieszka moves into a flat with a group of friends. The flat is called the Institute and it quickly appears that strange things begin to happen around it and in it. The inhabitants of the flat are held game by “them”, who also barricade windows, kill cats and gradually take away the inhabitants of the Institute. The identity of the enemy is finally unveiled but what will happen to the main character and her daughter?

Jakub Żulczyk’s debut novel “Zrób mi jakąś krzywdę” (DO ME SOME HARM) appeared in 2006, in 2008 his second novel was published under the title “Radio Armageddon” and it was instantly hailed as the most brutal and truthful novel about teenagers. Żulczyk’s writing was compared to that of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and William Gibson.