A Flat Place

By: Noreen Masud

Narrated by: Shazia Nicholls

Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

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 fans 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

Critic reviews

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 (India Bourke)

Stark, careful, enlightening (Jenn Ashworth)

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, author of 'Aftermath')

Marvellous. A radical, affecting testimony to unbroken spaces, histories, and notions of selves (Eley Williams, author of 'The Liar’s Dictionary')

Psychologically and politically riveting: Noreen Masud dares to poke the bones of the psyche with idiosyncratic brilliance, while she unwraps clingfilm-racism: airtight, watertight, hard to see and vital to name, that sly racism by which experience is exiled (Jay Griffiths, author of 'Kith' and 'Wild')

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, author of 'Insurgent Empire')

A beautifully written, important memoir, exploring environmental experience alongside trauma, belonging, prejudice and the self. It's a profound look at how landscapes can help us understand our inner worlds, and how our relationship with nature and place might make new ways of being possible (Rebecca Tamás, author of 'Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman')