A Flat Place

Author: Noreen Masud

United Kingdom, Great Britain | Pakistan | Memoirs | Colonialism & imperialism | Coping with illness & specific conditions

Published on 4^th April 2024 by Penguin Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 240 pages
198mm x 129mm | 170g

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, NEW YORKER Raw and radical, strange and beguiling - a love letter to Britains breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they containExpansive and arresting Financial TimesSharp, subtle and very moving Robert MacfarlaneA Flat Place reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures Sara AhmedNoreen 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 Britains 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.