The Premonitions Bureau

'Fascinating.' Hilary Mantel
'Terrific.' New Scientist
'Gripping.' Financial Times
'Stunning . . . Brimming with mystery and suffused 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In 1966, John Barker, a British psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate this very idea.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.

Sam Knight is a British journalist who has covered subjects such the plans for the death of the Queen, sandwiches and late capitalism, art fraud; plus profiles of Ronnie O'Sullivan, Jeremy Corbyn, and Theresa May. His work for the Long Read section of the Guardian and for The New Yorker has become influential and wildly shared. 'London Bridge is Down', published in 2017, was viewed 4 million times and remains the most popular Guardian long read ever published. Knight, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2018, has won two Foreign Press Association awards and was shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for political writing.