I finished a book! It feels like quite an accomplishment these days. And it was a very good book, too.

A Flat Place is on the shortlist for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction. I hadn’t intended to read any of the books on the list, but this one seemed different with an interesting premise and as soon as I started it I knew it was a book for me.

I have developed a huge liking for nature writing, long passages about the land and the creatures inhabiting it and in this memoir, Masud uses her affinity for flat landscapes to try to understand the traumatic circumstances of her early life in Pakistan. She was born to a Pakistani doctor father and a Scottish mother and she and her two sisters lived in virtual isolation from the city surrounding them and even the rest of her father’s family. Her father insisted on their separation from society and was a cruel man who practiced emotional tyranny over his family of women. Noreen never felt safe. When she was driven to school in the mornings, they passed a flat field that always soothed her, calmed the anxiety in her soul and also matched her flat emotional landscape – the landscape she adopted in order to survive.

When Noreen was fifteen, her older sister committed a breach that led to the women leaving Pakistan and taking up residence in Scotland with her grandmother. As she spent more time in the UK she was drawn more and more to the flat places of England and Scotland, the places where being able to see far ahead and not be distracted by changes in the terrain seemed to help heal her emotional wounds. She visits Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness and Orkney among other places and writes about them with an eye for the uncanny and with an interest in their hidden histories.

This book is a bit of a blend of memoir, nature writing, and an examination of complex PTSD. It’s a slow moving book but the pace matches the way Masud approaches her exploration of flatness and her own healing.

I wouldn’t have discovered this book if not for it being shortlisted for the Women’s Prize so in that way, it’s already done its job. I’ll be interested to see which book wins the prize on June 13.

News from the garden – over the weekend I decided to move several of my pots to the front of my house. It faces north and doesn’t get such fierce sunshine. It’s a bit cooler out there. I am hoping this will get some of the zinnias and cosmos to actually grow larger than a couple of inches. We shall see!