Flatlands

From the haunting East Anglian Fens to the enigmatic Orford Ness, the flatlands teem with hidden truths and lingering memories, etched into their stark beauty. Join Danielle Giles and Noreen Masud on a journey through these evocative terrains, exploring how landscapes shape us and how the past informs the present. A shared reflection on the natural world and our deep connection to it.

Danielle’s hypnotic historical novel, Mere, weaves a gripping tale of fear and survival, power and position, and a love that flourishes in the darkest of places. Set deep in the Norfolk Fens in 990 AD, this atmospheric story unfolds as a medieval mystery takes shape. When a young boy goes missing on the marsh, the secrets of a crumbling convent are brought to light.

Raw and radical, strange and beguiling, Noreen’s memoir A Flat Place is a love letter to Britain’s breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain. For as much as the landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession. A Flat Place was shortlisted for The Jhalak Prize 2024, The Ondaatje Prize 2024, and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award 2024.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Books are my Bag Reader Awards. Website / Instagram @noreen_masud

‘A beautifully written and elegantly constructed work that takes the author’s love for an usual kind of landscape and moves it into the most unexpected and thought provoking directions’ — Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

‘Sharp, subtle and very moving’ — Robert Macfarlane

Danielle Giles is a writer and researcher based in Bristol. She has been published (writing as Danielle Vrublevskis) in Extra Teeth and Dear Damsels, shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, and longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. She won the Local Prize in the 2023 Bath Short Story Award. Mere is her first novel; a second historical gothic is currently in the works. Website  / Instagram @daniellegileswriter

‘A dark and disturbing tale set in an East Anglian abbey in Dark Ages England, where the old pagan Gods are meeting a fledgling Christianity. A supernatural mystery, a political power struggle, a romance, a woman bringing compassion and healing to a brutal world, and fenland ripe with stagnant secrets. Beautifully written, you will be drawn into the claustrophobic world of the mere, where sinners fear the retribution of both God and the devil.’ — Laura Shepherd-Robinson, bestselling author of The Square of Sevens

‘It is rare for an author to fully recreate the strangeness of the past, but Danielle Giles has done exactly that. Through eerie, beautiful writing, she takes readers on a mystery in Medieval Norfolk, until, like the proud, resourceful women of this novel, one can’t help but be swallowed into one of the damp mouths of the mere. This is a gem of a novel.’ — Costanza Casati, bestselling author of Babylonia

Bookseller interview: Debut of 2025