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The Premonitions Bureau

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The Premonitions Bureau

By: Sam Knight
Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
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About this listen

'Fascinating.' Hilary Mantel
'Terrific.' New Scientist
'Gripping.' Financial Times
'Stunning . . . Brimming with mystery and suffesed with haunting atmosphere.' Patrick Radden Keefe

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In 1966, John Barker, a British psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate this very idea.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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Sam Knight (P)2022 Faber Audio Europe Great Britain History & Culture Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Psychology & Interactions Technology & Society Technology Thought-Provoking Mental Health

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Critic reviews

‘Fascinating.’ Hilary Mantel

‘Terrific.’ New Scientist

‘Gripping.’ Financial Times
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This is a pleasure to listen to. Carefully structured, beautifully narrated and perfectly balanced. I didn’t lose interest for one single minute

Wonderful work

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Really interesting telling of a snippet of history. I love the science that never was aspect of it.

Really Interesting

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Hard going especially at first the story is all over the place so a bit hard to follow but the Narrator saved it.

A little hard going but enjoyable

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Although the premise for this book was great, in reality it was just padded with lots of things not really getting to the meat of the topic. I was really looking forward to this book, the narrator has done a great job and I will search for more titles performed by him but I wouldn't recommend wasting the credit or the hours to find that fact out.

Disappointing waffle.

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Very well read, but it had me confused (and I still am). From the blurb I’d assume this was fiction, some sort of supernatural suspense story (and the style of narration still has me unsure) but the further I get through it (we are now on air crashes) the more I’m coming to the conclusion this is more of a history book.

Confused, I thought this was fiction

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Not sure that the Premonitions Bureau is the right title for this but it is an interesting listen nevertheless.

A bit of a ramble

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It's hard to know what to compare this book to, because although it's a biography of sorts, it's somehow more than just that. If you're interested in Psychoanalysis, the uncanny, gothic horror, the Aberfan tragedy and unexplained phenomena, you're sure to find something in this intriguing book. It’s brilliantly researched and very well written. It's definitely one of my top reads of the year and I recommend it to everyone I know.

A book that stayed with me long after I'd finished

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beautifully researched, sensitively told, this fascinating story was so wonderful, I read it without stopping.

superb, cannot put it down

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This is so beautifully written - clever without being smug, funny without being cruel, sensitive without being sugary. I so wanted to believe the precipients, to believe in some kind of hole in the space time continuum. I loved being in the psychiatric hospital, on Fleet Street, even at Aberfan. He writes as though he was there - an incredible evocation of a time completely gone by but just within touching distance. I loved this.

Fabulous writing

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There’s an interesting story at the core of this book. But the writer goes off on long tangents that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the main story. This meant there are large chunks that just didn’t seem to go anywhere. Disappointing overall.

Meanders a lot

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