Beautifully written so moving drew me right in to the authors life her story.A wonderful emotional moving read a story I will keep thinking about.#netgalley #melvillebooks

Wow, this book is lovely. Within the British nature writing/psychogeography tradition but its own unique take.

What I love about beautiful language in books is that it isn't just beautiful. Its rhythms and pauses and propulsions create deeper meanings. They enrich the meanings already contained in the words themselves.

This is a beautifully written book. Its language is so lovely. Its meanings are so fully supported by the music of the words. There must be a word that defines this kind of writing. It's like 'linguistic synesthesia' to me--and heck if I know what I mean by that, but here I go, I'm trying to explain. The language is compressed in a way that one meaning pushes agains another meaning, the way sound can press against color, or taste against sound, in actual synesthesia.

"Near the end of my British grandmother's life, one memory came back to her again and again, as her appetite dwindled and she shrank into her chair."

'At night mosquitoes arrived, buzzing malaria.'

'The wind which ran its blade down the flat land seemed to scrape away all color. What I remember is bleached green, and my feet in leather shoes, moving over the ground as if through a trance.'

This is one of those rare and precious memoirs that is so full of empathy and self-understanding that it gives you as much a sense of your own self as it gives you an understanding of its author.

My thanks to Melville House for an e-ARC of this title.
Since "Angela's Ashes" in the late '90's, memoirs seem to emphasize the "how bad my life was as a child - and how I grew out of it". While Masud did have a hard childhood, it never feels like she is asking for our pity.
An overbearing Pakistani Dr father and an English mother, she realizes later in life that she suffers from cPTSD. Complex PTSD, which builds up, rather than is the result of one event. She distances and objectifies others to feel comfortable. Disowned, and sent back to England with her mother, at the age of 16.
I wish she had shared a bit more about her academic life, both as a student and as a professor. I can't imagine how she has gotten where she is today (a full time Lecturer of Literature at the U of Bristol), given her inability to feel comfortable with other people, especially strangers (how did she make it through the small, intimate, seminars of graduate work!!!???}. Yet, she has succeeded in the tough academic world.
Given the title, of course this is also about her travels to various places in Great Britian, and her enjoyment, and searching for - flat places. They give her comfort. Along with finding the bones of dead animals, which she collects. Oh, and the parts in the book about her cat - it is like they come out of nowhere, but are so heartwarming!
Complete with Notes (interestingly, most of the citations are from having viewed the sources on the web). The only reason I am not giving this a 5 is I felt that last chapter was a bit all over the place. Yet it also brought it all togethe, and allowed her to connect otherwise disparate ideas.
A difficult book to read at times (emotionally), but it keeps you going to disciover her whole story.
Psychology, Nature, cultural studies and literature all brought to bear in a somewhat brief memoir. I hope her next title, if not something academic (her PhD dissertation on poet Stevie Smith has been published), will be how she worked her way through the world of academia with her cPTSD issues.

I absolutely loved reading this book. I was completely drawn into the topic and could not stop reading it.