'Moving, lyrical and frank.'
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 and Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: a place created by trauma.
She takes us through each landscape in turn, gradually revealing the effect of childhood trauma and a disrupted family background on her as an adult with complex PTSD. There are vivid characterisations of her British mother and Pakistani father. She also brings in a narrative of being a partial outsider as someone with mixed British-Pakistani heritage, both colonizer and colonized, inheritor and dispossessed. A revealing and highly personal memoir, often sad, and occasionally wry and funny.
The book was bought new a few weeks ago and has been read once. The pages are unmarked. No major blemishes; a good clean reading copy.