A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

The New Yorker's Best Book of 2023 "sorrowful, tender...beautiful." - The New York Times Book Review"...arresting and memorable....Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience." - Financial Times "Sharply, subtly, and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life." - Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey A surprising and lyrical journey--part memoir, part nature book--meditating on the meaning of "flatness" and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature's most undervalued wonders. For readers of Dr. Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal, Robert Macfarlane, G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure Does the concept of "flat" have an undeservedly bad rap? There are centurie