Ewan Morrison - Tales from the Mall

As Ewan Morrison notes in his introduction, the shopping mall is a potent symbol of the homogenised world in which we live now. You could look at images of shopping centres in Dundee and Dresden and chances are you won’t be able to tell them apart. The mall is also a ripe metaphor for social meltdown: little wonder that George A Romero set his 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead in a Philadelphia retail precinct.

With Tales from the Mall, the author of Swung and Distance seeks to find as many angles to the experience and aesthetic of the mall as he can. In among the fictional and (probably) true stories of people who inhabit these spaces whether through employment or leisure, he chucks in entertaining strands of history. We hear of the earliest shopping complex (The Agora in ancient Athens) to the proposed construction in Qatar that will be equivalent to 110 football pitches. Morrison has pulled together a wealth of information and anecdotes and produced a vibrantly funny and genuinely scary portrait of our times.