August’s Book of the Month was Alycia Pirmohamed’s ‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’ — a book that is its own body of water, writes Aileen Angsutorn Lees.
Shorelines is the highly anticipated non-fiction debut from award-winning poet Alycia Pirmohamed. It won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize, awarded to underrepresented nature writing. But this book defies genre, so I am reluctant to pigeonhole it. The act of labelling feels like an attempt to make a voice more understandable, more palatable to a specific audience. Like many racialised writers (myself included) Alycia refuses to be boxed in: ‘I want to undercut insidious thought processes that categorise me as either a Muslim writer or a nature writer, but never both.’
The book opens with a fissuring. In the prologue, ‘The Woman Who Belongs and Unbelongs in Two Waters’, Alycia places two moments in time side by side, arranged as two columns. Within them are fragments of memory, the forgotten seemingly marked by white space. While these two stories are separated, they can be read in tandem. It feels like the self splitting while co-existing — an embrace of duality. She writes one of my favourite metaphors, appearing later in the book, which I have held since reading her essay in Gathering: Women Of Colour On Nature. Alycia compares belonging to the mathematical asymptote, ‘the long line that can get close, so close, to touching its nearby curve… they do not touch, and they never will. The asymptote is the limit. I am the limit by which the oppressor can know themselves.’ I love the idea of reframing expectations around belonging, to turn the concept outward, repelling assimilation.
Shorelines is an exploration of ‘memory, migration and the selves we become’. The chapters are marked by geographical co-ordinates yet each is different in style, form and perspective. What results is a beautiful blending, a ‘resistance against a genre that is steeped in whiteness and bias.’ Alycia reflects on how the practice of writing has also shaped her experiences. She tussles with what she should and shouldn’t reveal both to the reader and herself, other times self-questioning through form. Her use of blackout and columned text amplifies feelings of erasure and containment. At times, I feel the literary sector looming. In ‘Trigger Notebook: Fragments from the shallows of memory’ interwoven strikethrough paragraphs initially seem like a critical voice she is trying to suppress. But this gradually reveals what feels like a truer narrative — of Islamophobia and genocide — that much of the world (still) refuses to acknowledge. To borrow her watery verb, her voice rivers between the loud and the quiet. The way Alycia uses language reflects the fluid space in which this book sits, and the ethereal quality of Alycia’s writing. It is captivating. It relays so effectively the feelings of being silenced.
Yet, Alycia also uses silencing as a form of resistance. At her launch event at Portobello Bookshop, she explained that when there is a pressure to give more of yourself for consumption, withholding can be an act of preservation. This resonated with my own experiences in environments, creative and otherwise, where there is an expectation to comply and conform.
The book honours this blurriness. She refers to misrememberings in the context of childhood memories with her family, as well as the trees she recognises but cannot name. There are many things which keep slipping just out of reach. Through the faint memories, Lake District mist and thick Alberta fog, there are recurring appearances of shapeless bodies. I am struck by her imagery of ghosts, who ‘unbend in the water, rising up to greet me like smoke’, and her reflections on imprints — the ones our ancestors make on us as well as those which we leave on our surroundings. In ‘An ocean lyric’, the movement of water over her body is ritualistic, rippling through the chapter like the paragraphs themselves. Each time she washes, dips and plunges, the ocean imprints onto her skin. It also carries a part of her into its own memory. ‘That water is a library keeping so many of our stories, the secrets and sometimes darknesses of our womanhood.’ The chapter is a powerful and tender turning point where moments swill, and bodies merge.
I am in awe of how Alycia draws connections across time and continents. She underscores place with displacement and grief, showing us how stories of migration and colonialism are intertwined with nature. She shows us how the outdoors evokes terror and joy. How memories fade and blend. How her body holds shame. How there is pain in the proximity and unknown. Across the ebbs and flows of lyrical prose and fragments, there are swells of emotions.
Alycia describes the sea/skin as ‘uncontained, reaching, seamless’ and I feel the same way about Shorelines. The book is its own body of water. It imprints onto you. I keep returning, experiencing something different depending on the weather/human condition that day. Each time, it refreshes.
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‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’ by Alycia Pirmohamed is out now and available here, published by Canongate (£18.04). Read an extract from the book here, and a Q&A with Alycia Pirmohamed here.
Aileen Angsutorn Lees is a writer and artist based in Perthshire. Her book ‘Tectonics’ was published by Edinburgh Art Festival in 2026. She has written for shado magazine, Fringe of Colour, Migrant Women Press, National Trust for Scotland, Bella Caledonia and The Courier, among others. Her poetry won the 2024 Bold Types Scottish Women’s Creative Writing Competition and was shortlisted for the 2026 Wigtown International Poetry Prize. She is the founder of Decolonising The Outdoors. Find her website here.