Flat Place

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024
SHORTLISTED 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

Değerlendirmeler

A beautifully written memoir that looks at how landscapes can help us understand ourselves . . . terrifically precise and lyrical . . . this book might be called a nature memoir: each chapter engages intimately with the natural world, from the Fenlands to the Orkney Islands, and even the stillest, flattest, and quietest revelations are inextricably tied to the environment. But equally, Masud pushes against determined traditions of nature writing. The expansive space of this memoir is an invitation to collapse boundaries and make room for experiences and bodies that are often erased from British history, and in doing so, Masud also voices the realities of this nation's colonial violence