A flat place

£10.99

Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father’s car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she’s discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma. Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain’s flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2024
BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, NEW YORKER

Raw and radical, strange and beguiling – a love letter to Britain’s breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain

‘Expansive and arresting’ Financial Times

‘Sharp, subtle and very moving’ Robert Macfarlane

Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes – their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the ‘flat place’ she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain’s landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession.

Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape – a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.

‘Beautifully written and elegantly constructed’ Kamila Shamsie

A Flat Place reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures’ Sara Ahmed

Read a sample here

Additional information

Weight 0.17 kg
Dimensions 19.8 × 12.9 × 1.5 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

304

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

155.9 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K

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