Editions

Bunker

  • Imprint: Allen Lane

  • ISBN: 9780241336014

  • Length: 352  Pages

  • Dimensions: 240mm x 33mm x 162mm

  • Weight: 573g

  • RRP: £20.00

Bunker

  • Building for the End Times

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020

'An extraordinary achievement . . . gripping, grim and witty' Robert MacFarlane

'Unputdown-able ... No book could be more timely' Richard J Evans

Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere.

In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus.

The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.

  • Imprint: Allen Lane

  • ISBN: 9780241336014

  • Length: 352  Pages

  • Dimensions: 240mm x 33mm x 162mm

  • Weight: 573g

  • RRP: £20.00

Reviews

  • How prescient and timely ... This is a tartly thoughtful work, by turns witty and philosophical, with an undercurrent of anger at the way we are governed and the commodification of existential fear. He writes pacily, bringing to vivid life a gallery of survivalist wingnuts, conmen and evangelists.

    Nick Curtis, Evening Standard

  • A kind of apocalyptic Super Size Me, in which the author force feeds himself a steady diet of paranoia, conspiracy, eschatology and end-times architecture.

    Chris Hall, The Guardian

  • This baseball-cap wearing academic is the world's leading expert on survivalists ... But he never expected Bunker to be so topical.

    Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, The Times

  • Brilliant ... Bunker, self-evidently a work for our times, shimmers with a Ballardian imagery of disaster and melt-down.

    Ian Thomson, The Spectator

  • Bunker is a thoughtful study into the nature of paranoia and the people who try to profit from it - and it makes for a page-turning read.

    Nathan Brooker, Financial Times

  • A scary, unputdown-able account ... No book could be more timely as we stay in our own little bunkers to avoid infection, strip the supermarket shelves of loo paper, and squirrel away supplies of food to see us through the shortages that many fear will follow a no-deal Brexit.

    Richard J Evans, New Statesman

  • This study of bunker sites and the people preparing for the worst couldn't be better timed.

    Andrew Anthony, The Observer

  • Garrett's research has involved hanging out with millenarian fruitcakes, disaster profiteers and the uber-rich, not to mention tooled-up, swivel-eyed anarcho-libertarians from America to Australia ... His sense is that disaster gives us an opportunity to rethink how we live. What will we learn?

    Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

  • This is a gripping and timely book about both the 'architecture of dread' and its multi-billion dollar industry, and what the growing appetite for bunkers reveals about the social conditions in which we live.

    New Statesman

  • Garrett is a bright and buoyant guide and Bunker rattles briskly along ... A necessary read.

    Literary Review

About the Author

Bradley Garrett

Bradley Garrett is an American social and cultural geographer based at the University of Sydney, whose work involves 'finding the hidden in the world', and lies at the intersections of cultural geography, archaeology and photography. His first book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, was an account of his adventures trespassing into ruins, tunnels and skyscrapers in eight different countries. He writes for, among others, the Guardian, and his work has been featured in media outlets worldwide, including Channel 4, ITV and the BBC in the UK. Garrett was a postdoctoral fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and has been an invited speaker at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House (Australia), Chicago Ideas Week and Google Zeitgeist (USA), and at the Tate Modern and Barbican galleries (UK).

Bradley Garrett

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