I felt like this book was all over the place. The summary and title made it seem like the book was going to be about premonitions, instead it was more of a biography, but with extra stuff added in. I will not buy this for my library.

The Premonitions Bureau was an interesting enough read for me. The history was interesting, but I think I wanted a bit more exploration of the phenomena itself (maybe I'm too much of a skeptic?). Regardless, I have some patrons in mind already, so we will be purchasing for the library.

The book talks about a British doctor who in the 1950s set up an experiment collecting reports of premonitions through the column in the newspaper. The doctor's hope was that by studying the premonitions' reporting, there could be a way to predict deaths and disasters. The author says the book idea came from a brown manila envelope untouched for years that he discovered in the Cambridge University library. There are four main characters in the book, the doctor, the reporter from the Evening Standard, and two seers. The book is full of spooky stories but there are also Kant and Freud and Jung present, all weighting in on the subject of premonitions. The author manages to convey the feelings of uncertainty over whether premonitions are just coincidences or they could be used as a prevention tool. Great fun for the fans of The Haunting of Alma Fielding: a true ghost story, by Kate Summerscale..