A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma-Fast Shipping

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The New Yorker’s Best Book of 2023

“sorrowful, .”
– The New York Times Book Review

“…arresting and memorable….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.” – Financial Times

“Sharply, subtly, and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, andthen out of,the traumas of her early life.” – Robert Macfarlane,author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

A surprising and lyrical journey—part memoir, part nature book—meditating on the meaning of “flatness” and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature’s most undervalued wonders.

For readers of Dr. Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal, Robert Macfarlane, G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, and Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure

Does the concept of “flat” have an undeservedly bad rap? There are centuries’ worth of adoration for rolling hills and dramatic, mountainous landscapes. In contrast, flat landscapes are forgettable and seemingly unworthy of poetic or artistic attention.

Noreen Masud suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: theproduct of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattensher emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world withanxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain’s flatlands, seekingsolace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural worldwith poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her ownearly life.

Masud’s British-Pakistani heritage makes her apartial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised,inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy ofpastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature’spower to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories thatresist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across theflat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vividand intimate account of the land beneath her feet.

Masud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. A Flat Place is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place — bodily and psychologically — and the healing properties of literature and landscape.