Reviews of Assembly by Natasha Brown

Media Reviews

Entertainment Weekly (Best Books of September) The fall's biggest debut comes from a former banker in London, who delivers a brisk, affecting diary of a young Black woman contemplating an opt-out of capitalism and life entirely. It's Mrs. Dalloway for the burnout generation, the anticapitalism manifesto millennials have been waiting for.

Harper's Bazaar This slimline novel may be minuscule at just over 100 pages, but it packs an oversized punch. A nuanced, form-redefining exploration on class, work, gender and race, Brown's debut has already garnered mass hype from the industry.

LitHub (Most Anticipated Books of the Year) A sharp, experimental novel about a Black British woman who did everything right, and yet still, when faced with her mortality, isn't sure her life is worth hanging on to. Clocking in at a mere 112 pages, this critique of British racism and the 'culture of more' can be read in an afternoon, and should be.

Vogue The literary debut of the summer.

Washington Post British writer Natasha Brown's first foray into fiction barely registers as a novel, at least in terms of size. But what it lacks in length — a slim 112 pages — it makes up for in strength. A scathing takedown of the British class system and the country's views on race, immigration and gender politics, Assembly packs a wallop.

The New York Times Book Review Assembly is a smart novel that takes risks with the questions it raises. I look forward to Brown's next work, in which she might try — with the same refreshing conviction — to answer them.

The Guardian (UK) A modern Mrs. Dalloway…Assembly is the kind of novel we might have got if Woolf had collaborated with Fanon, except that I don't think either ever reined in their sentences the way Brown does here, atomising language as well as thought…Brown nudges us, with this merging of form and content, 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.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) [B]rilliant...This is Brown's first novel, and it has all the jagged clarity of a shard of broken glass. A piercing meditation on identity and race in contemporary Britain."

Publishers Weekly (starred review) Brown's provocative and lyrical debut follows a young Black British woman's navigation of the racism and sexism at her investment banking job while she contends with a breast cancer diagnosis...References to bell hooks' writing on decolonization and Claudia Rankine's concept of 'historical selves' bolster her fierce insights. This is a stunning achievement of compressed narrative and fearless articulation.

 Ali Smith, author of Summer A quiet, measured call to revolution…[Assembly is] slim in the hand, but 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 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.

 Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People 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.

Reader Reviews

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• Literary Fiction
  
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• UK (Britain) & Ireland
  
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