Beyond Coincidence [Hardcover]

"Beyond Concidence has already caused many an overlong stay in the toilet"

"Pretty amazing"

"An entertaining and intelligent study"

"A superbly-crafted compilation of the most celebrated examples of the genre...marvellous"

"Addictive"

"Extraordinary stories"

"An intriguing investigation of the cosmos's most improbable events...a first-rate book"

This is a collection of over 200 stories of amazing coincidence and an exploration of the mystery and mathematics of synchronicity.

The coincidence project began as a series for Radio 4 and snowballed. The reason was that as soon as we started examining coincidences we became inundated with them. It wasn't just coincidence stories, though we soon had plenty of those; it was coincidences themselves, whose extraordinary correlations began crashing together about our own heads. Books opened at pages describing coincidence stories, people we rang were in the middle of conversations about coincidence, key words of things we discussed in the car would appear on passing billboards...

Coincidences cluster around preoccupations and no doubt we were obsessed, but when one day, while stopping people in the street to ask their birth dates as part of a probability experiment, we bumped into a man who had dedicated his whole life to synchronicity, it began to feel as though we could make them happen at will. Instead of writing books we should be buying lottery tickets!

Remembering that you're 20 times more likely to be hit by lightning than to win the lottery, we got on with the book. It's a small world, but as comedian Arnold Brown says, "I wouldn't want to paint it."

Long odds make coincidences all the more intriguing. It's the way events and objects hone in dramatically and sometimes mischievously on the very thing you are thinking about that beguiles first of all, yet as we were soon to discover, this is also a subject with enormous cultural, scientific and mathematical fascination. Not to mention coincidence jokes...

MARTIN PLIMMER is a journalist, broadcaster, member of comedy duo The Men Who Know and author of the novel, King of the Castle ("warmly recommended to anyone on active service with a family unit" - Daily Mail). Once, in a hospital waiting room after banging his head, Martin found a two-year-old magazine open at an article he had written on the subject of headaches.

BRIAN KING is an award-winning pioneer of radio fly-on-the-wall documentaries; the producer of hundreds of programmes for BBC Radio 4, including the long-running series On the Ropes and also, coincidentally, a series about coincidence, presented by Martin Plimmer.