The Premonitions Bureau
“A fluent and enticing book, skillfully navigating the tricky and marginal subject of the paranormal; it is beautifully ordered, humane, capacious.” — Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Booker Prize.
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"A story both elegant and eccentric, cleanly capturing that brief moment in the 1960s when extrasensory perception verged on mainstream acceptance. It is also quietly terrifying, a reminder that even those who can see the future have no hope of getting out of its way." ― The New York Times
In the 1960's, a British psychiatrist named John Barker became gripped by the problem of premonitions: when people seemed able to glimpse the future and, in particular, when they were warned of their approaching death. Barker set up an experiment, The Premonitions Bureau, with the Evening Standard newspaper, with the goal of collecting dreams and forebodings from the British public on a mass scale. It didn't go well.
My first non-fiction book grew out of this article for The New Yorker. There is more information about the U.S edition of "The Premonitions Bureau" here and the U.K edition here. If you would like to order the book, the Amazon page is here or you can support booksellers here. Thank you for reading!