A Flat Place
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Summary
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
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
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD 2024
BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, NEW YORKER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
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
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD 2024
BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, NEW YORKER
Reviews
It would be easy to assume that A Flat Place, dealing as it does in the currency of trauma, racism and exile, is a bleak book. But this memoir is too interested in what it means and how feels to be alive in a landscape to be anything other than arresting and memorable... Masud characterises with sly humour "the proper nature people", with maps in plastic pockets round their necks... In the flatlands of Britain, and in the memories they evoke of the flat places of Pakistan, Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience... A Flat Place is a slim volume, but that belies its expansive scope
Financial Times