The unnamed narrator of Natasha Brown’s debut, Assembly, is a black woman working in finance, and its ostensible focus is a visit to her boyfriend’s family estate. However, the story takes place almost entirely inside the narrator’s head. This stream-of-consciousness novella sometimes strays closer to being a polemic essay than a piece of fiction, which in this instance, isn’t a bad thing at all. We find out early on that the narrator has been diagnosed with some kind of life-threatening condition and is refusing treatment, but doesn’t seem too concerned with her physical future. Instead, she consistently bashes against the walls of her own mind as she muses on the impossibilities of truly existing as a black woman in Britain. The central theme is how black lives have been monetised, from the compensation paid to slaveowners after Britain abolished slavery early in the nineteenth century, to the way she is exploited and tokenised by capitalism today.

The narrator’s voice becomes increasingly desperate as she considers how futile it is to make people see white supremacy when they don’t believe it’s there: ‘Explain air… Prove what can’t be seen. A breezy brutality cuts you each day.’ To survive, she feels she is being asked to ‘become the air’ and so considers opting out, letting her own body kill her. Her younger sister is on the same ‘successful’ life trajectory, and she believes that by dying she can help her out: ‘I have amassed a new opportunity, something to pass on. Forwards. To my sister.’ However, the claustrophobic twist in this tale is that the narrator herself still can’t think past money, giving her sister a stake in the system that has ground her down: ‘I have the flat, savings and some investments, pensions, plus a substantial life-insurance policy.’ While I admired what Brown was doing with this book, for me it did suffer a bit from the typical curse of the novella; I felt it could have been tightened into an incredible short story or expanded into a wonderful novel. But although it didn’t quite hit as hard as it might have done, it’s still a haunting piece of writing. 3.5 stars.

This is a pretty short book but full to the brim.
I was a bit confused by the style at first, I couldn't work out the characters. Then I realised it was just about the main character and everyone else was peripheral. It was a kind of stream of consciousness.
I think its a brilliant description of how the world around her has impacted the character and has led her to the choice she has made.
Worth a read and a good discussion book for a book group.

Fans of Bernadine Evaristo and Candice Carty-Williams will enjoy this. Beautifully written, poetic and snappy. It touches on racism, micro aggressions, sexism and classism. It also touches on what it means to be alive, what it means to survive and to thrive, especially as a young black woman.

Short, but powerful in its brevity. Faces issues of race and class head on with the kind of straightforwardness that forces you to face them too. An unusual and important read that stays with you.

This is a short book which challenges what we think a story should be. No neat beginning, middle, end, the way this story is written reflects the challenges it deals with, the issues of race and class faced by the protagonist.
It also deals with facing a cancer diagnosis, and challenges how we are encouraged to do this. No battle, the protagonist keeps the diagnosis to herself, considers the option of rejecting treatment.
The words in this book are not hard to read, but the messages within are more challenging leaving the reader with plenty of food for thought.

This is a very short book, but so powerfully written. The writer's experiences are described so vividly that they really get under your skin. The conversations are excruciating when seen through the narrator's perspective. I look forward to reading more from Natasha Brown.

At just over 100 pages, Assembly is a short but stop-you-in-your-tracks powerful read. I often read the first few lines of a book to get a feel for it before coming back to later but I COULD NOT stop reading this.

The stream-of-consciousness structure tells the story of a young British Black woman. She works in a competitive, mainly male, mainly white firm in the City, London.

After a life of playing by the rules, complying and doing everything she can to succeed when all the odds – her gender, her race, institutionalised racism – are stacked against her, she is rising in her career but a health scare makes her reconsider everything.

So many ideas and themes including race, misogyny, unconscious and conscious bias, the wiping of Black history are explored through the narrator and her new outlook on life. Meanwhile, a sense of tension and intrigue is steadily built up around the narrator and her choices, completely engrossing me in her story too.

This may sound like a heavy read and it is if you digest all its saying but it feels effortless to read thanks to the amazingly sharp and lyrical way it is written. Natasha Brown’s writing style here might not be for everyone but I loved diving head first into the head of this character and jumping around with her train of thought.

Assembly is unlike anything I’ve read for a while, a novella that has something to say and does that so well. It’s scathing, it’s insightful, it makes you think about things you may not have before and reflect when you’ve finished it. Love it when a powerhouse read hits me like this.

I loved this book!
I would suggest it as a modern UK equivalent to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time - short, punchy and tackles so much around racism and multi-cultural Britain today. At only 100 pages, every word is honed, conveying ideas and challenges.
The narrator is a successful bank employee who begins to question her position and actions as complicity with the status quo. There are explorations of entitlement and institutions which aim to preserve the purity of history, of Empire - education, economic trade deals, echelons of society.
It is, by turns, angry, despairing and sometimes quite dark - at one point the narrator wonders if she should give in and let her recently diagnosed cancer run rampant and untreated (comparing it to assimilation in white society).

If you enjoy short works with sparking language that stimulates and inspires, I recommend this.

An unfortunate case of a novel being not so much unaccomplished as far too similar to others I’ve read recently: a young woman navigating a work life and relationships that aren’t all they’d cracked up to be (Stubborn Archivist, The Inland Sea, Exciting Times, Adults, little scratch); a young Black woman suffering microaggressions from colleagues and strangers alike (Queenie, Luster). This is a whole subgenre at the moment: A friend calls them “disaster woman” books because there’s an element of self-sabotage to all these young female protagonists, even if societal forces are against them, too.

The Black British narrator is in banking (like Carole, one of the characters in Girl, Woman, Other) and is trotted out as an example of diversity on every possible occasion. At school assemblies she dutifully holds herself up to the students as a model of what they can achieve if they work hard. She has a white boyfriend and one day gets on a train to meet his parents and attend a posh party at their home. She must have it all together, right? In fact, she feels her position and accomplishments are tenuous. I found what happens melodramatic and too neatly symbolic – more like a play than like real life. The writing is interesting enough in how it incorporates titled fragments, sometimes from different points of view, but the book ends suddenly, right in the middle of things, leaving me unsatisfied.

Another book that I was really looking forward to that just fell flat. I really hate to give this debut a low rating, especially one on such an important topic. Regardless, here's what I did and didn't enjoy about Assembly.

The good:

✧ In the parts of the story that I could grasp well, I felt that Brown offered an interesting exploration of race and class. There was a lot of unpacking of experiences that Black people, myself included, will absolutely be familiar with. Better yet, the book focused on the experiences of Black people in the UK, which I am absolutely dying to see more of. The mention of familiar events, like being accepted into Haberdashers Aske's, made it easier to connect with the narrative.

✧ I also liked that the narrator was kept anonymous. We never hear her addressed by name. This also made it easier to imagine that she could be you or a family member or a friend, and made her thoughts and ordeal feel all the more real.

The bad:

✦ Unfortunately, Assembly was quite confusing for me to read from start to finish - the kind of confusing that makes me feel dumb for not understanding what's going on. It was very jumpy from scene to scene and sometimes the dialogue was unclear. In general, the story's written in a very abstract way. It doesn't really follow a plot; it's more of an exploration of ideas through the lens of one main character. But that abstractness made it tough to follow.

✦ In a similar vein, the writing was quite stylistic, which I did like, but I think because of this the main message of the book got lost. I think with writing that was easier to grasp, alongside the short length of the story, Assembly would've been an amazing exploration of race that really packs a punch.

To be honest, I do think there are a lot of people out there who will really like this book, and I'm sure critics will absolutely eat this up. It may be more that it just doesn't fit the style of writing that I can enjoy. So with that said, I would still go ahead and recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading this type of intellectual fiction.

Massive thanks to Penguin General UK and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Natasha Brown is a writer to watch! This timely, striking read is excellently written and fantastically thought-provoking. It's a novel for our times. Thanks for the ARC!

“Pull at it, take these strands, gather them up and spool them around you; reconstruct yourself from the scraps”

Assembly follows the fragmented stream of consciousness of a young Black woman working in the finance sector in London, navigating her life and relationships with those around her after receiving a cancer diagnosis. In this book, Natasha Brown somehow manages to write a scathing and forensic review of racism, classism and misogyny in modern-day Britain in just 112 pages. It was such an intriguing read and I definitely enjoyed it.

Thank you to Penguin UK/Fig Tree for allowing me to read this - I can’t wait to see what Natasha Brown does next.

Thanks to Penguin for letting me read an advance copy of Assembly by Natasha Brown. A short, powerful and incisive debut novel (only 112 pages!), it's a fierce exploration of racism, class and toxic corporate culture. An unnamed black narrator, working in the City, goes to stay with her boyfriend's aristocratic parents for a weekend - a plot that allows for thoughts surrounding privilege and anger, assimilation and existence. I found it thought-provoking, interrogative, clever - all the adjectives you'd expect from a book of this kind. The ending was a little anti-climactic, after such a successful build-up, and I'm not sure the book quite did all the things it promised it was going to do. But reading this as an eproof perhaps did it a bit of disservice - after all, I normally need fragmentary or unconventionally told books in a physical or at least a 'properly' formatted form. So I'm not sure I fully appreciated this in the way it deserved - one to reread, maybe. 4 🌟

“His parents tolerated me. As good, socially liberal parents would. They were patient with their son in the matter of his relationships. They imagined, I imagined, that this was a phase. Why prolong it with negative attention? And so they accommodated it. Welcomed it – me, ostensibly.”

This is the type of book you might finish in one morning and then find yourself picking it up to read all over again in the afternoon; searching for something different than what you found the first time.

Brown’s debut Assembly is a novella which follows the preparations of its narrator – an unnamed Black British woman – as she gets ready to attend an anniversary garden party hosted by her white, wealthy boyfriend’s family at their estate.

The stylistic choices throughout the novella were intriguing, and in a way (and totally my overcomplicated opinion) demonstrated the narrator’s choice to dive headfirst into her narrative and reclaim it. Brown touched on various significant themes, including racism, intersectional feminism and classism, while portraying the micro-aggressions that infiltrate the day-to-day life of the narrator.

It feels almost like a stream of consciousness as the narrator navigates the misogynistic and racist attitudes of her work colleagues and boyfriend’s family. And the fact that Assembly was tricky to follow in parts made it all the more intriguing – I found myself reading and rereading, shaking my head and nodding. I think it is a story that requires more than one read; I would definitely go back for a second dip to see what else I can pick out. It’s a timely comment on the attitudes of society and the, often invisible, barriers that make it difficult for Black women to reach the level of “success” of their white counterparts – male and female.

This is short, sharp gut-punch of a book which looks primarily at racism and the British class system through the eyes of a young Black woman who works in corporate finance. I read it as a take-down of the argument that discrimination is class based rather than racist. The writing was beautifully sparse, fragmented and poetic in many places - this worked really well as a counterpoint the subject matter. Read in one sitting and still thinking about it.

A totally absorbing read with exceptional poise and the occasional flash of righteous anger. Mrs Dalloway for the 21st century, this short novel is a must read.

This short book tackles some serious issues, such as racism, sexism, white middle-class entitlement and so on in a stream of consciousness. Unfortunately I found it confusing at times and hard to read and didn't think that the figurative language always worked well.

A young black British woman establishes herself in The City in the face of rampant casual/institutional racism, misogyny and capitalism. A health scare may be the crisis she needs to reassess how she lives her life.

Brown’s razor-sharp prose and unremitting attention to detail tackles the full battery of assumptions, aggressions and exclusions confronting her unnamed narrator. The sensory detail captures the atmosphere and lay-out—including felt-padded dividers—of the corporate office, and further identifies the protagonist as an outsider.

Fierce and arresting.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin UK for the ARC.

This is very short but quite powerful account of a young British black woman (unnamed) who is reviewing her life after a diagnosis of cancer for which she has refused treatment. She has battled racism in many forms some of which are quite shocking, but she has got herself a good education and has broken through the glass ceiling. She has also nabbed herself a privileged rich white boyfriend. But what does she really want?

This is a stunning literary debut that takes no prisoners from Natasha Brown, an erudite, succinct, and incisive forensic examination of race, British history, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, misogyny, and the never ending cuts of everyday micro-aggressions experienced by an unnamed black woman of Jamaican heritage from a working class background. She has done all that is expected of her to ascend to the heights of an investment bank, and to cap it all, is on the cusp of achievement, entry into the highest social strata of the establishment, marrying her white boyfriend with his old money and privilege. At the point of arriving at his parents anniversary party on their country estate, she should be happy, instead she is exhausted and perhaps for the first time in her life, given her health issues, she feels some sense of agency and power as she considers whether this marriage is one compromise too far.

In a stream of consciousness as she assembles the pieces of her that have allowed her to ascend, she removes the fig leaf of illusion used to promote a narrative of British diversity, tolerance. justice and equality, to lay bare the unpalatable truths that being black will ensure that you will never be accepted. Never be British enough for a country that operates an ongoing hostile environment, other than a 'tokenism' that rewards the 'right kind' of diversity. Any success is so often seen and attributed to any diversity impetus rather than any of her abilities or qualifications she may have. To ascend, one must be unnoticed, be invisible, never inconvenience others or make them feel uncomfortable, mirror the culture of the ruling class, and never insert oneself into the main narrative. She struggles for independence or any sense of her own identity, exploited as PR as a portrayal of diversity to the outside world, where an unquestioning compliance is the cost of going up in the world, splintering and cracking herself to fit, to assimilate, yet assimulation is out of reach.

You may have lived here for generations, lives comprised of pain, excruciating suffering, unrelenting hard work, exploitation, denigration and abuse, yet not ever be truly accepted, always the outsider, the black other, a relic of the old Empire. This history where so many bemoan the loss of a clearer sense of identity to be found in those colonial times, a misrepresented past where all is done to obliterate the realities, cruelties and truths of what British rule actually meant. This is a short, searing, insightful and unforgettable depiction of a black woman's life and rise up the social and economic ladder, experiences which may prove to be uncomfortable and challenging to read, but ultimately so rewarding. An unmissable state of the black British nation debut that I highly recommend. Many thanks to Penguin UK for an ARC.