Gareth E. Rees – författare

LONGLISTED FOR RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2021'Terrific... Britain's urban landscape is just as freighted with myth and mystery as its castles and ancient monuments and [Rees] proves it by unearthing a treasure trove of riveting stories.' - Sunday Times, Best Books of the Year, 2020-----There is a Britain that exists outside of the official histories and guidebooks - places that lie on the margins, left behind. A Britain in the cracks of the urban facade where unexpected life can flourish. Welcome to UNOFFICIAL BRITAIN.This is a land of industrial estates, factories and electricity pylons, of motorways and ring roads, of hospitals and housing estates, of roundabouts and flyovers.Places where modern life speeds past but where people and stories nevertheless collect. Places where human dramas play out: stories of love, violence, fear, boredom and artistic expression. Places of ghost sightings, first kisses, experiments with drugs, refuges for the homeless, hangouts for the outcasts.Struck by the power of these stories and experiences, Gareth E. Rees set out to explore these spaces and the essential part they have played in the history and geography of our isles. Though mundane and neglected, they can be as powerfully influential in our lives, and imaginations, as any picture postcard tourist destination.'Unexpected and fascinating' - Melissa Harrison, author of The Stubborn Light of Things'The mythical and the municipal collide in a weirdly compelling tour of Britain's built environment.' - Financial Times

‘A fascinating if stark warning about human hubris in ignoring our place in nature’ New ScientistTravel through drowned forests, vanished villages and sinking cities: the lost lands of our past, present – and future. ‘A rich, haunting account of lost lands and vanished futures.' Professor David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils  From Stone Age lands that slipped beneath the English Channel to the rapid inundation of New Orleans, Gareth E. Rees explores stories of flooded places from the past – and those disappearing before our eyes. The places lost to the eternally shifting boundaries between water and land continue to have a powerful emotional resonance today. Their uncertain features emerge to haunt us, briefly, when the moon draws back the tide to reveal a spire or a tree stump. And, imbued with myths and warnings from the past, these underwater worlds can also teach us important lessons about the unavoidability of change, the ebb and flow of Earth’s natural cycles, and the folly of trying to control them. Sunken Lands peels back the layers of silt, sea and mythology to reveal what our submerged past can tell us about our imminent future as rising sea levels transform our planet once more. Praise for Sunken Lands ‘An evocative and essential guide to disappeared places and difficult futures.’ Will Wiles, author of Plume ‘A beguiling exploration of lost worlds beneath the sea’ Merlin Coverley, author of The Art of Wandering    ‘A reassuring perspective on the Anthropocene: the ebb and flow of civilisations, the inevitability of change and our capacity for renewal. Thoughtful and necessary writing.’ Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time

'The problems started the day we moved to Hastings...'When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend's tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust?THE STONE TIDE is a novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the stories we tell to make sense of the world.

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.

Ten tragicomic tales of environmental and personal disaster from the margins of town and country.A troubled hipster is seduced by an electricity pylon.Sinister omens manifest in a supermarket car park.A motorway bridge becomes a father.Malevolent bacteria plague a polar icebreaker.A bioengineered abomination lurks in a Gloucestershire railway terminusThe weekly bin collection pushes a man over the edge.A former squatter clings to her home on a crumbling cliff.Joyriders are foiled by Anglo Saxon floodwaters.Vampiric entities stalk B&Q.And fiery catastrophe comes to the zoo.Gareth E. Rees's first collection of short fiction explores lives on the verge of breakdown, where ordinary people are driven to extremes by the effects of late capitalism and ecological collapse.

Cocker spaniel by his side, Gareth E. Rees wanders the marshes of Hackney, Leyton, and Walthamstow, avoiding his family and the pressures of life.He discovers a lost world of Victorian filter plants, ancient grazing lands, dead toy factories and tidal rivers on the edgelands of a rapidly changing city.As strange tales of bears, crocodiles, magic narrowboats, and apocalyptic tribes begin to manifest, Rees embarks on a psychedelic journey across time and into the dark heart of London itself.First published by Influx Press in 2013, Marshland is a deep map of the east London marshes where nothing it as it seems, blending local history, folklore, and weird fiction in a genre-straddling classic of contemporary place writingThis fully revised and expanded 2024 edition features brand-new material and never before-seen photographs from the author’s archive.