Description
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, arresting, with sly humour... Masud establishes herself as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience Financial Times
Noreen Masud fathoms the depths of flat landscapes - sharp, subtle and very moving Robert Macfarlane
Haunting and generous, beautifully written - this book is a gift Preti Taneja
A Flat Place reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures Sara Ahmed
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.
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