As someone who now, effectively, lives between three different countries, I’ve become increasingly interested in the relationship between space and self. I’m finding that, far from being the passive surroundings onto which we project our experiences of the world, the places in which we conduct our days are, in fact, the very ingredients that determine who we are and how we are able to think.

These themes take center stage in Noreen’s A Flat Place, a rich and winding work which has as its subject the specific environment of flat landscapes — those that are not just geographic, but social and psychological, as well. As she writes in her book, “A flat place helps us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘happen’ and to rethink what it means for something to ‘matter.’ To accept that not all discoveries involve digging for answers ...