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.
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.
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780241544051Number of pages: 240Weight: 361 gDimensions: 222 x 144 x 25 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'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'- Preti Taneja
'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'- Robert Macfarlane
'A moving,lyrical and frank reflection on place,space and the shifting contours of self. This is a new kind of migration narrative,one that finds stories in both stillness and movement,in flatness and undulation'- Priyamvada Gopal
'Marvellous. A radical,affecting testimony to unbroken spaces,histories,and notions of selves'- Eley Williams
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