PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- John Barker was a young and brilliant psychiatrist, who found himself demoted to work in a country mental asylum. It was the early 60s and the treatment of the inmates had barely progressed since Victorian times but he had new ideas he wished to try, including aversion therapy. Alongside his medical and scientific beliefs, he had a fascination for psychic and paranormal happenings, which he had started collecting as a student. After the disaster in Aberfan, where the waste from a coalmine slid down a mountain and deluged the small Welsh town, his interest in premonitions grew. In 1966, along with an up-and-coming scientific correspondent for Evening Standard newspaper, he established the Premonitions Bureau, in the hope of studying the accuracy of people's predictions. Perhaps they could become a sort of early warning system - though if they were accurate, and they did prevent a tragedy, then how on earth could a person have pre-warning? And if you were personally warned of something that would befall you, how do you live? Barker would find out for himself…
This is an elegant and respectful story of an educated man's perhaps-eccentric obsessions. It is an absorbing and thoughtful read, non-judgemental and thoroughly fascinating! Lindy
'Fascinating.' - Hilary Mantel
'Terrific.' - New Scientist
'Gripping.' - Financial Times
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In 1966, John Barker, a British psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate this very idea.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.
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- John Barker was a young and brilliant psychiatrist, who found himself demoted to work in a country mental asylum. It was the early 60s and the treatment of the inmates had barely progressed since Victorian times but he had new ideas he wished to try, including aversion therapy. Alongside his medical and scientific beliefs, he had a fascination for psychic and paranormal happenings, which he had started collecting as a student. After the disaster in Aberfan, where the waste from a coalmine slid down a mountain and deluged the small Welsh town, his interest in premonitions grew. In 1966, along with an up-and-coming scientific correspondent for Evening Standard newspaper, he established the Premonitions Bureau, in the hope of studying the accuracy of people's predictions. Perhaps they could become a sort of early warning system - though if they were accurate, and they did prevent a tragedy, then how on earth could a person have pre-warning? And if you were personally warned of something that would befall you, how do you live? Barker would find out for himself…
This is an elegant and respectful story of an educated man's perhaps-eccentric obsessions. It is an absorbing and thoughtful read, non-judgemental and thoroughly fascinating! Lindy
'Strange and gripping . . . the most hardened sceptic can't fail to be electrified by the stories.' - Guardian 'Knight's writing is so lucid and wryly authoritative that it never fails to hold you . . . A brilliant book, by turns disarming, thought-provoking and spooky.' - Irish Independent
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