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    Car Park Life
    Car Park Life
    Car Park Life
    Ebook236 pages3 hours

    Car Park Life

    By Gareth E. Rees

    4.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Car parks: commonplace urban landscapes, little-explored and rarely featured in art and music, yet they shape the aesthetics of our towns and cities. Hotspots for crime, rage and sexual deviancy; a blind spot in which activities go unnoticed. Skateboarding, car stunts, drug dealing, dogging, murder.
    Gareth E. Rees believes that the retail car park has as much mystery, magic and terror as any mountain, meadow or wood. He's out to prove it by walking the car parks of Britain, journeying across the country from Plymouth to Edinburgh, much to the horror of his family, friends – and, most of all – himself. He finds Sir Francis Drake outside B&Q, standing stones in a retail park, and a dead body beside Sainsbury's.
    In this darkly satirical work of non-fiction, Gareth E. Rees presents a troubling vision of Brexit Britain through a common space we know far less about than we think.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherINFLUX PRESS
    Release dateOct 22, 2019
    ISBN9781910312360
    Car Park Life
    Author

    Gareth E. Rees

    Gareth E. Rees is the author of Unofficial Britain, longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and one of the Sunday Times best books of the year 2020. He's also the author of Car Park Life, The Stone Tide and Marshland. His first short story collection, Terminal Zones, was published in 2022 and examines the strangeness of everyday life in a time of climate change. He lives in Hastings with his wife and children.

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    • 5/5
      One of the weirder or stranger books that you may stumble across and something that only the English could produce.

      A casual encounter with a supermarket car park after hours leads the author into the hidden life of these ubiquitous but invisible public spaces. Realising that after the shopping is done these spaces become the host to all kinds of surreptitious and dodgy activities like drug deals, burnouts, and bunkups.

      This realisation leads to an obsession with the mythology and psychology of these modern arenas.

      Freely admitted early on that this obsession will eventually lead to the loss of his marriage, his house, and some of his sanity, we are nonetheless invited to ride shotgun on this bizarre odyssey into the unknown territory that opens up when we question the seemingly ordinariness of this world in which we move, for the most part, like ghosts.

      It would be nice to say that this book leads to insights and understandings of the modern world but in truth the fabric of the premise of this book disintegrates in sync with the authors life and grip on reality.

      I admired his vulnerability.

      As someone who has often sought the deeper meaning to superficial things and events, I could relate directly to this authors quest and also, sadly, to his unraveling.

      Who wouldn’t want to know that there was more to this modern life than simply: consumerism, ill-disguised ignorance, a world where people seem unable to differentiate between opinions and facts?

      Who doesn’t want a sense of mystery running through their lives?

    Book preview

    Car Park Life - Gareth E. Rees

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