The Premonitions Bureau

What if you had a vision that something terrible was going to happen?

A train crash, a department store fire, an assassination.

What if you could share your vision, and prevent a disaster?

In 1966, John Barker, a British psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate this very idea. He would find a network of curious correspondents, and among them two highly gifted ‘percipients’. Together, they predicted calamities and international incidents with uncanny accuracy. And then, they gave Barker their most disturbing warning: that he was about to die.

Review

Strange and gripping . . . the most hardened sceptic can’t fail to be electrified by the stories. ― Guardian

Knight’s writing is so lucid and wryly authoritative that it never fails to hold you . . . A brilliant book, by turns disarming, thought-provoking and spooky. ― Irish Independent

A propulsive, atmospheric story, featuring a cast of strange characters . . . Rich and fascinating. ― The New Statesman

Stunning . . . Brimming with mystery and suffused with haunting atmosphere. — Patick Radden Keefe

An elegant and illuminating work of cultural history. ― TLS

An eerie and amazing account of coincidence and fate, and the impossibility of knowing the difference. I loved this fascinating book. — Emma Cline

Fascinating . . . A gripping, compulsive story about the search for meaning in an unpredictable world. ― Financial Times

A venture into the strange world of coincidence and prediction . . . It’s a book hard to classify, but wholly fascinating: lively, nimble, its subject poised on the frontiers of the possible. — Hilary Mantel

Terrific . . . A compelling, beautifully written book. ― New Scientist

He combines a flair for American narrative non-fiction in the tradition of David Grann, Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion, with an absurdist lens on British life . . . Knight has one of those curious brains that flows into every last corner of his material. ― Sunday Times

A story both elegant and eccentric. ― New York Times

Works powerfully as a dramatic, sepia-tinged illustration of the evergreen – indeed, historically always true – notion that stranger things are possible than can currently be rationally explained. ― Daily Telegraph

Fascinating . . . A wonderfully sharp and lively book. ― Mail on Sunday

Addictive . . . [A] must-read . . . Spooky [and] gripping. ― Evening Standard

Outstanding . . . [An] enthrallingly spooky account of a strange 1960s experiment. ― The Bookseller

Book Description

The story of a strange experiment – a journey into the oddest corners of 60s Britain and the outer edges of science and reason.

About the Author

Sam Knight is a British journalist who has covered subjects such the plans for the death of the Queen, sandwiches and late capitalism, art fraud; plus profiles of Ronnie O’Sullivan, Jeremy Corbyn, and Theresa May. His work for the Long Read section of the Guardian and for The New Yorker has become influential and wildly shared. ‘London Bridge is Down’, published in 2017, was viewed 4 million times and remains the most popular Guardian long read ever published. Knight, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2018, has won two Foreign Press Association awards and was shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for political writing.