Honestly, this book blew my mind. The fact that this was once paid for research by the government, but also that we as humans could potentially be able to have premonitions? Imagine!

Didn’t actually read the ebook as I had issues with the download. Purchased for public library. Very interesting premise. Always been interested in paranormal associations and this tells a story of taking it to a more practical attempted usage. Very interesting and good social history.

Really enjoyed this book. A selling point is how much it reads like a novel when this is actually a non-fiction book about a very real organsation.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight tells the bizarre true story of a Shropshire-based psychiatrist, Dr John Barker, and his work on precognition in the mid-20th century. Having met several people who claimed to have predicted the Aberfan disaster in 1966, Barker set up the Premonitions Bureau with Peter Fairley, a science writer at the Evening Standard, in order to collect predictions and see if anyone was able to accurately predict events and disasters. It didn’t surprise me to learn that ‘The Premonitions Bureau’ is an expansion of Knight’s New York Times article from 2019 on the same topic, as the narrative does feel rather padded out in places even for a relatively short book, but this is a fun and unique account of a distinctly odd story I had never heard about before. Many thanks to Faber and Faber for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

This is terrifying but also so interesting! Totally different to what I'd normally read, and although I found it a bit clunky in places I really enjoyed learning about the premonitions bureau, which until the book literally arrived in store I was convinced was a fiction book being packaged as non fiction!

This was a fascinating portrayal of a very strange chapter in social history - well-told, deeply weird and a great page-turner.

A fascinating examination of the Premonitions Bureau, set up by an experimental psychiatrist and the science editor of the Evening Standard in the aftermath of the Aberfan Disaster. It aimed to match up people’s psychic warnings with real life events to see if the future could be predicted. It’s seems so far-fetched that this was an actual thing but that’s what drew me in - it’s a great story with interesting characters. It’s well researched and written, easy to read and I loved it!
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

The Premonitions Bureau is a book about a strange experiment conducted in the 1960s by psychiatrist John Barker. The experiment was designed to investigate whether or not people could accurately predict future events. Barker gathered a group of hundreds of people who claimed to have premonitions and asked them to share their visions. Two of the participants, a pair of unnervingly gifted "percipients", seemingly predicted a number of plane crashes, assassinations, and international incidents. They also predicted that Barker himself was going to die. This is a very well written book by Sam Knight, with a strange, almost dream-like quality. It makes no conclusions about whether or not the premonitions are real, instead letting the reader decide. There is the slight feeling that this would have made for a very good longform magazine article rather than a slightly repetitive book. But it's a very good recommended read.

Somewhere between 3 - 3.5

A curious book about an unlikely topic: a bureau created by a psychiatrist in the wake of the Aberfan disaster in 1966 in an attempt to predict future disasters around the world (a few children killed in the Welsh mining village are also said to have foreseen the tragedy). Attracting premonitions from around the globe, two of the "percipients" were said to have predicted plane crashes, RFK's assassination and the Hither Green train crash.

Whilst rather readable, this is something of a sui generis book - I really don't know who I'd recommend it to given that it doesn't slot neatly into any particular genre. The book did feel like it could have been slightly shorter or better edited but this is a minor niggle. I don't regret my time spent reading it and am sure it will find its fans in those who have an interest in science and niche moments in history.

First and foremost, my thanks to Faber & Faber and Net Galley for the digital ARC of this title.

It is a rare thing when I take a foray into non-fiction titles - if I'm going to take the dive, I like my non-fiction with a driving narrative and an interesting story. The Premonitions Bureau had plenty.

The Bureau was created after the Aberfan disaster in October 1966. John Barker, a psychiatrist, was involved with assisting parents of children who were lost in the disaster. However, he was shocked to find out that two children had foreseen the disaster via dreams or drawings in the days leading up to the tragedy. Barker wondered if some events, especially those of an extreme or violent nature, could cause some people to have premonitions.

Knight weaves a compelling and narrative driven story about Barker's foray into these seemingly supernatural experiences and the scientific explanations behind them. Barker was interested in whether or not one could be scared to death or that your thoughts could end up killing you. It wasn't something I personally had considered until reading Knight's book.

This was a quick and interesting read (when I first heard of the title I thought it was a work of fiction, because how could the Premonitions Bureau be real) and I enjoyed Knight's thoroughness and ability to spin a good yarn. Definitely a recommended read for someone who wants to read a book that truly is stranger than fiction.

This book is so fantastic in all senses. It's so bonkers and yet it's all true and that's so much of the allure here. It's one of those books that makes you want to grab people, look deep into their eyes and start every sentence you utter with 'did you know?'

Various people's tales are interwoven here, but the main story belongs to John Barker, a doctor who worked in British mental hospitals during the fifties and sixties and who came to believe that there was something more than coincidence when people had premonitions.

After the national tragedy that was the Aberfan disaster in 1966, Barker teamed up with a journalist to launch The Premonitions Bureau, which ran for 18 months and which invited members of the public to log any premonitions they had and send them to the Bureau who would collate the information and see if there was any truth to Barker's hunch.

Knight is a completely even handed investigator here. He presents the facts and makes no attempts whatsoever to ridicule or mock those who became involved in the Bureau. There is a real sense of openness to whatever he might discover and that's what makes the book far more compelling reading than if he had already decided the angle and was simply tailoring the data to fit his ideas.

This is fresh and strange and utterly captivating from start to finish.

I'd never heard of The Premonitions Bureau before I stumbled upon this book and found the concept fascinating. Unfortunately, the book didn't live up to my expectations.

Created in the late sixties by John Barker and Peter Fairley, The Premonitions Bureau aimed to predict disasters by using the visions sent to them by members of the public. Whilst two of the people involved predicted events with an eerie accuracy, the experiment is largely a failure, with just a 3% success rating. The book never delves into the concept of premonitions or even the idea of coincidences/making the visions fit the reality which appears to happen several times.

Overall, it makes for a rather dull read as it is essentially just an account of the experiment itself and doesn't examine premonitions, nor does it analyse the claims provided to the bureau in any detail. Given that it's a rather short book, I feel more time spent on this would have made for a more interesting read.

Thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd and NetGalley for the ARC.

The Premonitions Bureau was a fascinating book. It dealt with tragedy in a way that was both empathetic but dispassionate, which I found genuinely surprising. The idea behind the real-life "Premonitions Bureau" is so far-fetched that the book could easily have fallen into farce and become a lighthearted non-fiction comedy of errors. But it didn't. Sam Knight managed to deal with his subject matter in a way that showed genuine compassion for every person in his story, no matter what role they played.

Despite being factual, The Premonitions Bureau read like a novel, and I found myself furiously turning the pages to find out what happened next. For this reason, I felt the end was a little lacking - but I suspect that is due to the nature of the events themselves, and not for any poor writing on Knight's part. Because the rest of the narrative was so engrossing, the end of The Premonitions Bureau felt like a flame that just fizzled out and left me a little underwhelmed.

Still, this is a crazy non-fiction romp that I can highly recommend to readers of all kinds. Knight takes no firm stance on the objective truth of premonitions, which made the book thought-provoking rather than restrictive. I'll definitely be reading more from Sam Knight in future.

This is an illuminating look into a quirky and previously unknown to me avenue of fairly recent British history. It tells the story of the Premonitions Bureau, an organisation that tried harness the aid of psychics in predicting disasters. It started up after the horrors of Aberfan, and ran through the rest of the sixties. largely led by two interesting and contrasting characters, who drive the narrative. It’s an interesting history, but that’s all it is. The book never really interrogates the idea of premonition, and isn’t that interested in questions about the existence of such a force.A lot of the cases described in the book seem to me to be instances of trying to make a vision fit an event by looking at the similarities and ignoring the inconvenient differences. There’s almost no argument about premonition versus coincidence, and if there was indeed any basis in fact for the Bureau’s work. The author does find room for some philosophical conundrums (if a psychic predicting a disaster means that disaster is averted, does that mean the prediction was false in the first place as there was no disaster?) but I kept reading expecting some sort of analysis of the realism of the whole idea, and was left hanging. Perhaps it’s outside of the book’s remit, but it’s not a long work, and I believe it would have been improved by some more rigorous analysis of the psychics’ claims. It’s a very interesting read as far as it goes, but I wish it had gone a bit further.

Created in the aftermath of the 1966 Aberfan disaster (which saw an overflowing hilltop waste tip send a landslide of mining slurry onto the tiny Welsh town at its base, killing 144, mostly schoolchildren), the Premonitions Bureau was envisioned as a clearinghouse for augurous information that might, somehow, prevent such tragedies in the future. Conceived of by psychiatrist John Barker — a mental health reformer with an interest in unusual mental conditions and precognition — in partnership with self-promoting newspaperman Peter Fairley, the Premonitions Bureau made for good newspaper copy, but poor proof of presentiment: Of the thousands of tips that were sent in, only three percent could be plausibly linked to eventual occurrences. More than the story of this questionably useful project itself, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story is really about the people involved in it (and especially Barker) and author Sam Knight makes a fascinating tale of it. This might be a little padded with information that I didn’t find quite relevant (did I need to know that Robin Gibb was one of the passengers on a London-bound train wreck?) but even the padding was interesting in its own right (it was Robin Gibb after all), and I found this to be a thoroughly satisfying read.

Looking at it from this side of the Premonitions Bureau era (spoiler: it no longer exists) this seems like such a far fetched idea to persist into relatively recent memory and that's what makes it so enticing to read. A respected psychiatrist, the Evening Standard and a volunteer helpline for those who feel they've perceived a premonition (the precipients) work together over the course of years and multiple disasters come to match these psychic warnings with real-life events.