Part-travelogue through Britain’s flat landscapes, part-memoir, A Flat Place investigates how flat spaces might give shape and succour to complex trauma. It’s been reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the Chicago Review of Books, the i paper, Prospect, the Big Issue, Hyphen, and the Arts Desk.
‘A Flat Place cuts new ground, mixing literary criticism, decolonial history, and boldly anti-Romantic ‘nature’ writing, in searing prose as sad as it is funny, to confront the noninnocence of writing ‘nature’ and place. This is an important and original interruption of the so-called ‘nature cure’ — Abi Andrews, author of The Word for Woman is Wilderness
‘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.
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.
Published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton
Brian Swimme
Elisabet Sahtouris
Oliver Smith
