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For readers of W G Sebalds Rings of Saturn Amy Liptrots The Outrun and Richard Mabeys Nature Cure

Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands Her earliest memory is of a wide flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her fathers 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 Britains 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 Noreens 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 natures 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 P2023 Penguin Audio