A Flat Place by Noreen Masud

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
LONGLISTED 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 MacfarlaneNoreen 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.