The Premonitions Bureau
SAM KNIGHT
(FABER & FABER, 256 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

In the manner of the best New Yorker articles (and the British author of this gem of a book, Sam Knight, is a staff writer at the New Yorker), The Premonitions Bureau opens by homing in on a single, non-famous character who lives quite a mundane life but will somehow be caught up in the story about to unfold.

Miss Middleton, aged 52, taught piano and dancing in the front room of her house, 69 Carlton Terrace, Edmonton, north London. The thing about her was, she had premonitions. At 6 a.m. on 21 October 1966, three hours before the Aberfan disaster, she woke up “choking and gasping with a sense of the walls caving in”. At 9.30 a.m., another man, Alan Hencher, who worked on the continental telephone exchange for the GPO, began to tremble all over and “knew that a big disaster was taking place”. These two would become known as “the Aberfan percipients”.