The Premonitions Bureau cover art

The Premonitions Bureau

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Premonitions Bureau

By: Sam Knight
Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £21.99

Buy Now for £21.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

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In 1966, John Barker, a British psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate this very idea.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

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Orwell: The Essays cover art
The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh cover art
Into the Uncanny cover art
Conspiracy cover art
Carville's Cure cover art
Recollections cover art
Borrowing Life cover art
Homelands cover art
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes cover art
Time and Tide cover art
The Watchers cover art
To Hell and Back cover art
Asleep cover art
Lindbergh cover art
The Believer cover art
Hiroshima cover art

Critic reviews

‘Fascinating.’ Hilary Mantel

‘Terrific.’ New Scientist

‘Gripping.’ Financial Times
All stars
Most relevant  
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Really interesting telling of a snippet of history. I love the science that never was aspect of it.

Really Interesting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not sure that the Premonitions Bureau is the right title for this but it is an interesting listen nevertheless.

A bit of a ramble

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
beautifully researched, sensitively told, this fascinating story was so wonderful, I read it without stopping.

superb, cannot put it down

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews