Diamond-sharp, timely and urgent... Written in a distilled, minimalist prose, Assembly is illuminating on everything from micro aggressions in the workplace, to the reality of living in the "hostile environment", to the legacy of British colonialism
Observer, Best Debuts of 2021
A quiet, measured call to revolution. It's about everything that has changed and still needs to change, ... Read moresocially, historically, politically, personally... Its impact is massive; it strikes me as the kind of book that sits on the faultline between a before and an after. I could use words like 'elegant' and 'brilliantly judged' and literary antecedents such as Katherine Mansfield/Toni Morrison/Claudia Rankine. But it's simpler than that. I'm full of the hope, on reading it, that this is the kind of book that doesn't just mark the moment things change, but also makes that change possible
Ali Smith, author of 'How to be both' and 'Summer' In just 100 pages Natasha Brown delivers a body blow of a book. Assembly is extraordinary, each word weighed, each detail meticulously crafted... Brown is mercilessly clear-eyed in her delineation of how British culture is also "assembled" - its history whitewashed and arguing against it near-impossible when "the only tool of expression is the language of this place". Yet she wields that language like a weapon and hits her mark again and again with devastating elegance
The Times
Incredible. [Assembly] moves the English novel on. Slim book, massive importance
Max Porter, author of 'Grief is the Thing With Feathers' Stunning, blisteringly eloquent... Assembly heralds a powerful new voice in British literature
The Sunday Times
Assembly is brilliant. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway meets Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Natasha Brown's ability to slide between the tiniest, most telling detail and the edifice of history, the assemblage of so many lives in so many times and places, is as breathtakingly graceful as it is mercilessly true
Olivia Sudjic, author of 'Asylum Road' Daring and distilled... A hauntingly accurate novel about the stories we construct for ourselves and others... A completely captivating read you won't be able to put down
Independent
Assembly fulfils, with exquisite precision, Virginia Woolf's exhortation to "record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall... [It] calls to mind Frantz Fanon's work on the psychic ruptures caused by the experience of being colonised, or W. E. B. Du Bois's idea of double consciousness. Assembly is the kind of novel we might have got if Woolf had collaborated with Fanon... Brown nudges us towards an expression of the inexpressible - towards feeling rather than thought, as if we are navigating the collapsing boundaries between the narrator's consciousness and our own
Guardian
I read it compulsively in a single sitting. Assembly expertly draws out the difficulties of assembling a coherent self in the face of myriad structural oppressions. Casting a wry look at faded aristocrats, financial insiders and smug liberals, Natasha Brown takes the conventional tics of the English novel - the repressed emotion and clipped speech - and drains away the nostalgia. What's left is something hard and true
Will Harris, author of 'Mixed Race Superman' and 'Rendang' It more than lives up to the hype. Propulsive, devastating, unflinching and deft... This is a heartbreaking novel that offers glimmers of hope with its bold vision for new modes of storytelling... Brown's voice is entirely her own - and Assembly is a wry, explosive debut from a coruscating new talent
inews
A powerhouse of a book
Stylist
Set over 24 hours as an unnamed Black British woman prepares to attend a garden party hosted by her boyfriend's wealthy parents. With a clear eye she assesses her experience of corporate culture with its embedded racism, her awful boss, the myth of true social mobility... A short but exceptionally powerful novel from a gifted new writer
Bookseller (Editor's Choice pick)
In this excoriating indictment of the white supremacy underpinning the office space, Natasha Brown shows us the triple bind under which Black British Women live. How can there be wholeness in a society which demands so often that Black women melt parts of themselves down so that the machinery can shape them anew? I have scarcely read a work of fiction which confronts me so clearly and viscerally with the nature of injustice in our contemporary moment. This is an important work from a writer I hope we'll be hearing from for a long, long time
Kayo Chingonyi, author of 'A Blood Condition' One of the buzziest debuts of the summer
Vogue
Natasha Brown's exquisite prose, daring structure and understated elegance are utterly captivating. She is a stunning new writer
Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize winning author of 'Girl, Woman, Other' This marvel of a novel manages to say all there is to say about Britain today in the most precise, poetic prose and within the story of one complicated, compelling woman. Formally thrilling, politically captivating, endlessly absorbing... I will never forget where I was when I read it, how I felt at the start of it and by the end - it takes you on a complete carousel of a life lived both in dread and in defiance. Superb.
Sabrina Mahfouz, poet & playwright, ‘A History of Water in the Middle East’ Like the fictional companion to Jamaica Kincaid's nonfiction masterpiece A Small Place... A book like a finely honed scalpel - marking a new and electrifying dawn
Elaine Castillo, author of 'America is Not the Heart' Tightly conceived and distinctively written, perceptive, precise and unsparing... An elegiac examination of a Black woman's life and an acerbic analysis of Britain's racial landscape. Brown's rhythmic, economic prose renders the narrator's experiences with breathless clarity
New York Times
Stunningly good
Elizabeth Day, presenter of the 'How to Fail' podcast Assembly is an astonishing work. Formally innovative, as beautiful as it is coolly devastating, urgent and utterly precise on what it means to be alive now
Sophie Mackintosh, author of 'The Water Cure' Searing... A rousing, inspired voice demanding to be recognized and heard
Washington Post
Deft, essential, and a novel of poetic consideration, Assembly holds (the Black-British) identity in its hands, examining it until it becomes both truer and stranger - a question more than an answer. I nodded, I mhmmed, I sighed (and laughed knowingly, bitterly)
Rachel Long, Folio Prize-shortlisted author of 'My Darling From the Lions' Bold and original, with a cool intelligence, and so very truthful about the colonialist structure of British society: how it has poisoned even our language, making its necessary dismantling almost the stuff of dreams. I take hope from Assembly, not just for our literature but also for our slow awakening
Diana Evans, author of 'Ordinary People' Mind-bending and utterly original. It's like Thomas Bernhard in the key of Rachel Cusk but about black subjectivity
Brandon Taylor, author of 'Real Life' Brilliantly sharp and curiously Alice-like... It centres on a gifted and driven young Black woman navigating a topsy-turvy and increasingly maddening modern Britain... Her indictment is forensic, clear, elegant, a prose-polished looking glass held up to her not-so-post-colonial nation. Only one puzzle remains unsolved: how a novel so slight can bear such weight
Times Literary Supplement
A piercing, cautionary tale about the costs of assimilating into a society still in denial about its colonial past. Brown writes with the deftness and insight of a poet
Mary Jean Chan, author of 'Flèche' Bold, elegant, and all the more powerful for its brevity, Assembly captures the sickening weightlessness which a Black British woman, who has been obedient to and complicit with the capitalist system, experiences as she makes life-changing decisions under the pressure of the hegemony
Paul Mendez, author of 'Rainbow Milk' This is a stunning achievement of compressed narrative and fearless articulation
Publisher's Weekly
One of the most talked-about debuts of the year . . . you'll read it in one sitting
Sunday Times Style
Thrilling... Brown gets straight to the point. With delivery as crisp and biting into an apple, she short-circuits expectation... This is [the narrator's] story, and she will tell it how she wishes, unpicking convention and form. Like The Drivers' Seat by Muriel Spark, it's thrilling to see a protagonist opting out and going her own way
Scotsman
A nuanced, form-redefining exploration on class, work, gender and race
Harper’s Bazaar
Across 100 lean pages, Brown deftly handles a gigantic literary heritage... Her style rivals the best contemporary modernists, like Eimear McBride and Rachel Cusk; innocuous or obscure on a first reading, punching on a second... Assembly is only the start
Daily Telegraph
There's something of Isherwood in Brown's spare, illuminating prose... A series of jagged-edged shards that when accumulated form an unhappy mirror in which modern Britain might examine itself
Literary Review
A debut novel as slender and deadly as an adder
Los Angeles Times
A razor-sharp debut... This powerful short novel suggests meaningful discussion of race is all but impossible if imperialism's historical violence remains taboo
Daily Mail
Bold, spare, agonisingly well-observed. An impressive debut
Tatler
Excoriating, unstoppable... The simplicity of the narrative allows complexity in the form: over barely a hundred pages, broken into prose fragments that have been assembled with both care and mercilessness
London Review of Books
Beguiling and beautifully written, this is the work of an author with a bright future
Tortoise
Coruscating originality, emotional potency, astonishing artistic vim... This signals the arrival of a truly breathtaking literary voice... A scintillating tour de force
Yorkshire Times
Fierce and accomplished, Assembly interrogates the high cost of surviving in a system designed to exclude you
Economist
I was blown away by Assembly, an astonishing book that forces us to see what's underpinning absolutely everything
Lauren Elkin, author of 'Flaneuse' Coiled and charged, a small shockwave... Sometimes you come across a short novel of such compressed intensity that you wonder why anyone would bother reading longer narratives... [Assembly] casts a huge shadow
MoneyControl
An extraordinary book, and a compelling read that had me not only gripped but immediately determined to listen again... Highly recommended
Financial Times on 'Assembly' in audiobook
'As utterly, urgently brilliant as everyone has said. A needle driven directly into the sclerotic heart of contemporary Britain. Beautiful proof that you don't need to write a long book, just a good book'
Rebecca Tamas, author of 'Witch' Every line of this electrifying debut novel pulses with canny social critique
Oprah Daily
Devastatingly eloquent, bold, poignant
Shelf Awareness
An achievement that will leave you wondering just how it's possible that this is only the author's very first work... Brown packs so much commentary and insight inside of every single sentence... Original and startling all at once. After reading Assembly, I cannot wait to see what Natasha Brown does next
Shondaland
A brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment
Guardian, 'Best Fiction of 2021'
Justine Jordan
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