About the Book
Brought to you by Penguin.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
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
For readers of W. G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure
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 has discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Morecambe Bay, 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. Noreen's British Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet.
©2023 Noreen Masud (P)2023 Penguin Audio
About the Author :
Noreen Masud is a lecturer in twentieth century literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. A Flat Place, her first trade book, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award the, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Jhalak Prize and the Ondaatje Prize.
Review :
It would be easy to assume that A Flat Place, dealing as it does in the currency of trauma, racism and exile, is a bleak book. But this memoir is too interested in what it means and how feels to be alive in a landscape to be anything other than arresting and memorable... Masud characterises with sly humour "the proper nature people", with maps in plastic pockets round their necks... In the flatlands of Britain, and in the memories they evoke of the flat places of Pakistan, Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience... A Flat Place is a slim volume, but that belies its expansive scope
Masud's moving work of nature writing is grounded in a vital impulse: our need to bring suffering of all kinds out into the light
Nature writing can feel a bit samey [but] Noreen Masud offers a powerful antidote . . . A journey into flatness might sound like a tough sell, but this is so worth it. The whole book is zingily fresh
Stark, careful, enlightening
A domineering father . . . features in Noreen Masud’s lyrical, melancholy A Flat Place, in which the author travels to some of Britain’s starkest landscapes, including Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and Orkney, while reflecting on themes of exile, heritage and her troubled childhood in Lahore, Pakistan
Flat lands are overlooked, the bearers of our inattention. Moors, deserts, floodplains, fens alike have too often been effaced to the point of invisibility. In A Flat Place, Noreen Masud makes brilliantly good this lack; her book fathoms the depths of such landscapes, and their curious abilities to archive and erase, to unsettle and to console. In her prose, terrains of the spirit and the earth begin to slip over one another, like acetate sheets seeking a match. Sharply, subtly and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life
A beguiling mix of landscape and memory . . . utterly original and haunting. Her beautiful and tender prose inducts one into a completely new way of seeing the world – a vision that is absorbing, evocative and memorable
A beautifully written and elegantly constructed work that takes the author’s love for an usual kind of landscape and moves it into the most unexpected and thought provoking directions
Haunting and generous, beautifully written, revealing and refusing in the best ways - this book is a gift to all who have experienced complex trauma, all who seek the long view, all who crave solitude as we do community, all who see in flat landscapes the chance to reflect on the depths of the self as it heals
In this profound and moving book, Noreen Masud shows how what has been overlooked as flat and empty is alive with significance. The writing is not only achingly beautiful, it conveys in its own rhythm how small undulations give nuance and form. We learn how complex trauma gets everywhere, affects everything; who one is, how one is, with whom one is. Stories of violence and memory, colonialism and patriarchy, family and friendship, are interwoven with delicacy and care. A Flat Place teaches us how the struggle some of us have to be in the world can be how we craft different worlds. It reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures
