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A Flat Place
- Narrated by: Shazia Nicholls
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
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A Flat Place
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Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
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
For fans of W. G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure
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. Noreen suffers from complex post traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life. Noreen's British Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet.
Critic reviews
What listeners say about A Flat Place
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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- Lindsey Moore
- 10-08-23
Stunning prose
A very, very smart debut, that resists a linear healing narrative but has many moving moments. Elegant prose with stunning imagery.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- X
- 15-07-23
Wonderful.
A beautifully written book exploring a sense of place through the sense of the body.
Utterly absorbing, the narrative visits large contextual themes through personal story and direct experience in a potent and rich way, with skill and sensitivity.
Loved this!
Louise Kenward
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Henry
- 04-06-23
Depths of Flatness
It's become common in recent years for nature writing to focus increasingly heavily on the writer's own state of mind; Masud goes a stage further, and writes as much, or perhaps more, about her experiences and mental health, but relating these to the landscapes which she explores. The USP, of course, is that these landscapes are not the more obviously impressive mountainous areas, but superficially boring flat ones.
I wasn't quite persuaded by the relationship for which Masud argues between these geographical flatnesses and her emotional flatness, but that made them no less interesting. Her personal story, and her honesty about her psychology and emotions are gripping, if harrowing, while the accounts of her explorations provide a welcome contrast in style, and are often lighter in tone. In her final excursion, to Orkney, the two sides are drawn closer together through the development of her relationship with her mother.
One final note: some of the more abstract, philosophical passages I suspect work less well as an audiobook than on the page -- I occasionally had to rewind and listen to a passage again -- but on the whole the narrator is a convincing interpreter of Masud's narrative voice.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Janet P
- 21-01-24
Brilliant and compelling
Exquisitely written memoir and well narrated. Such a thought-provoking account of selfhood, place, and whose lives matter.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-01-24
like following a thought to the end
I really loved this telling of flat lands. It was an exploration into something I take for granted - as I live in a flat landscape - and made me see them in a new light.
The intertwining of CPTSD theory, the memories and causes of this, and the here and now experiences worked wonderfully. A lovely story of connection and learning to be again.
gentle yet powerful.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-05-24
Beautiful and thought-provoking
A beautiful, gentle and unique tale. Utterly beguiling. I was carried along and drawn in to the words.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Dale Kedwards
- 08-05-24
Incredible
in not usually drawn to memoir as a genre, but this is just dazzling. A book about self knowledge, family, the intimacy of space and our emotional, visceral, and intellectual attachments to it. I loved this book.
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