It was like reading something by Offill + Rachel Cusk with a dash of Zadie Smith. I struggled my way through Assembly, trying to understand what was going and who was saying what. And it’s just my luck but style-wise Assembly shares far more with the latter than the former. So blinded I was by the ‘for fans of Raven Leilani’ that I did notice the ‘and Jenny Offill’ that followed. There’s the thinking, rationalizing I (me). But all that assumes a great many shared assumptions on the part of the readers - an ability to read between someone else’s lines.But I try to consider events as if they’re happening to someone else. So why does her life feel so unbearable? What comes next? And do her achievements represent progress?Īt a certain point, the story falls away and the narrator steps forward to express her frustration with the toxicity of the novel itself - a white, bourgeois form that rewards indirection, subtlety, and subtext. She is even invited to share her success story with eager young women at a school assembly. Within a 100 neat pages, this non-linear, stream-of-consciousness narrative follows a young black woman who has invested everything in transcending her race, class and gender to attain a high-paid position in a cut-throat bank.
Natasha Brown’s debut novel is a small but blistering take on the British elite and its poisonous relationship with immigration, work and sexual politics. She developed 'Assembly' after receiving a 2019 London Writers Award in the literary fiction category and lives in London. Natasha Brown has worked in the financial services for the last ten years and studied Maths at Cambridge University.
And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life.
'Assembly' is a story about the stories we live within - those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can't escape the question: is it time to take it all apart? At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend's family estate, set deep in the English countryside. The narrator of 'Assembly' is a Black British woman. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career.
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