![]() We all know premonitions are impossible-and yet they come true all the time. In Sam Knight’s crystalline telling, this astonishing true story comes to encompass the secrets of the world. But in the face of professional humiliation, Barker only became more determined, ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life. As Barker’s work plunged him deeper into the occult, his reputation suffered. Middleton was one of hundreds of seemingly normal people, who would contribute their visions to Barker’s research in the years to come, some of them unnervingly accurate. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a “premonitions bureau,” in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing future calamities. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. “Stunning… An enveloping, unsettling book, gorgeously written and profound.” - Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Painįrom a rising star New Yorker staff writer, the incredible and gripping true story of John Barker, a psychiatrist who investigated the power of premonitions-and came to believe he himself was destined for an early death Knight probes the space between coincidence and the ineffable mystery of supernatural possibilities." " thought-provoking and deeply researched book. With deft skill, he explores historical theories of perception, time, death, fear." prose glides like mercury and he does not waste a word. Knight’s book is crisp.” - Dwight Garner, New York Times pushes his material into neurobiology, into the nature of placebos and expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. ![]() “This is rich, florid, funny history, with undertones of human grief.
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