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.

In conversation, Noreen discusses her memoir-travelogue A Flat Place: a book about how flat landscapes might provide a kind of language to help us understand strange lives and experiences, including complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

“A Flat Place reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures.” Sara Ahmed