A Flat Place

De: Noreen Masud

Narrado por: Shazia Nicholls

Duración: 7 h y 48 m

Resumen del Editor

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 readers 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.

©2023 Noreen Masud (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Haunting and generous, beautifully written, revealing and refusing in the best ways - this book is a gift to all who have experienced complex trauma, all who seek the long view, all who crave solitude as we do community, all who see in flat landscapes the chance to reflect on the depths of the self as it heals." (Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath)

"Noreen Masud conjures a sensibility that has eluded most - writers hoodwinked into supposing that what's flat must be empty of significance. But to dwell upon flatness, as Masud does, is to find oneself reoriented. It is to ask who we are and where we are if we no longer take the bait of imagining our lives as a dig or a summit or a horizon." (Devorah Baum, author of Feeling Jewish)