Premonitions Bureau

Paperback, 256 pages

English language

Published July 9, 2023 by Faber & Faber, Limited.

ISBN:: 978-0-571-35757-4

(2 reviews)

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

Premonitions are impossible. But they come true all the time.

Most are innocent. You think of a forgotten friend. Out of the blue, they call.

But what if you knew that something terrible was going to happen? A sudden flash, the words CHARING CROSS. Four days later, a packed express train comes off the rails outside the station.

What if you could share your vision, and stop that train? Could these forebodings help the world to prevent disasters?

In 1966, John Barker, a dynamic psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate these questions. He would find a network of hundreds of correspondents, from bank clerks to ballet teachers. Among them were two unnervingly gifted "percipients". Together, the pair predicted …

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

Premonitions are impossible. But they come true all the time.

Most are innocent. You think of a forgotten friend. Out of the blue, they call.

But what if you knew that something terrible was going to happen? A sudden flash, the words CHARING CROSS. Four days later, a packed express train comes off the rails outside the station.

What if you could share your vision, and stop that train? Could these forebodings help the world to prevent disasters?

In 1966, John Barker, a dynamic psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate these questions. He would find a network of hundreds of correspondents, from bank clerks to ballet teachers. Among them were two unnervingly gifted "percipients". Together, the pair predicted plane crashes, assassinations and international incidents, with uncanny accuracy. And then, they informed Barker of their most disturbing premonition: that he was about to die.

The Premonitions Bureau is an enthralling true story, of madness and wonder, science and the supernatural - a journey to the most powerful and unsettling reaches of the human mind.

5 editions

altlovesbooks reviewed Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight

Review of 'Premonitions Bureau' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

You know, for a book about premonitions and foretelling disaster, this was pretty boring.

Back in 1966, there was a major industrial accident in Aberfan, Wales. Several tons of coal mining debris collapsed, slid down the mountain it was perched at the edge of, and buried a school. Several people all around the world experienced premonitions of the event, in the form of dreams of black or a choking feeling. John Baker, a psychiatrist, collected all this information, and became convinced of the idea that people can and do experience predictive moments. That future disasters could be staved off if only he could harness the power of these predictions. Thus, the Premonitions Bureau was established.

If the book had actually been about this Premonitions Bureau, maybe it would've been more coherent and interesting to me. Unfortunately I think this book suffers from a compelling idea without a lot of information …

You know, for a book about premonitions and foretelling disaster, this was pretty boring.

Back in 1966, there was a major industrial accident in Aberfan, Wales. Several tons of coal mining debris collapsed, slid down the mountain it was perched at the edge of, and buried a school. Several people all around the world experienced premonitions of the event, in the form of dreams of black or a choking feeling. John Baker, a psychiatrist, collected all this information, and became convinced of the idea that people can and do experience predictive moments. That future disasters could be staved off if only he could harness the power of these predictions. Thus, the Premonitions Bureau was established.

If the book had actually been about this Premonitions Bureau, maybe it would've been more coherent and interesting to me. Unfortunately I think this book suffers from a compelling idea without a lot of information behind it. NPR's review of the book says that this book was written based on an article in The New Yorker from 2019 about John Baker (can be found here), and honestly after skimming the article, there isn't much else about the Bureau that wasn't included in the article.

What can be found in the book is a lot of meticulously researched ideas and examples of premonition in human history. Lots of weird coincidental events, people dreaming of disasters, visions of something happening, that actually come true. None of them are related to one another and there's barely a mention of the Premonitions Bureau throughout, but mildly interesting on their own nonetheless.

Ultimately this was a miss for me, though. It wasn't cohesive, I couldn't really tell why I was reading each event or how it related to the book until quite a bit in, and honestly it was dry as dust throughout. I thought the most interesting part of the book was learning about the mining disaster up front, honestly.

Rob Hedges

rated it

May 5, 2023