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A Flat Place

By Noreen Masud
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Brief Description
Beautiful and haunting, a personal journey through Britain's flatlands and a reckoning with the painful memories and hidden histories they contain. A Flat Place by Noreen Masud explores her enduring love for flat landscapes—celebrated for their stark beauty, formidable calm, and their ability to defy the... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Beautiful and haunting, a personal journey through Britain's flatlands and a reckoning with the painful memories and hidden histories they contain.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud explores her enduring love for flat landscapes—celebrated for their stark beauty, formidable calm, and their ability to defy the human gaze. These landscapes reflect her inner world, embodying the 'flat place' within her, an emotional numbness and memory loss stemming from childhood trauma. However, for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, Britain's landscapes signify both a legacy and a sense of dispossession, providing solace yet remaining places of unrest.

Pursuing this paradox, Noreen weaves together impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore, and history of the land, alongside recollections from her own early life. She delivers a startlingly strange, vivid, and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape—a seemingly still and motionless place that is nonetheless defiantly alive.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780241994337

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 04 April 2024

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 16.0mm

Width: 129.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 172g

Pages: 240

Collections

Biography & Memoir Happiness & Mental Health Health & Wellness History & Archaeology History & Military Non-Fiction Noreen Masud Penguin Books Self-Help & Personal Development

About the Author

Noreen Masud is a lecturer in twentieth century literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. A Flat Place, her first trade book, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award the, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, the Jhalak Prize and the Ondaatje Prize.

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