Natasha Brown’s Assembly has been out in the UK since June and I first heard about it in the Booker longlist predictions of UK-based booktubers, bloggers, and bookstagrammers and what I heard intrigued me greatly. I put it on my Booker prediction list based on the strength of those recommendations and, although it didn’t make the list, it definitely made my “must read” list. I am so glad to have found out about it and because it’s a powerful read.

Assembly is a short book—just over 100 pages—but it packs a lot into that compact space. Our unnamed narrator is a Black woman in her thirties who works in the banking sector in London. In descriptions of the book, it’s usually said that it is about her going to a party being held in the country by her white, moneyed boyfriend’s family, but really, that was only part of what the book was about. It is much, much more.

With a lot of flashbacks and cuts between scenes in the office, at doctor’s offices, and with her friend and boyfriend, Assembly addresses a wide range of topics around sexism, classism, xenophobia, and especially, racism. Like Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, it embeds examples of glaring prejudice and countless daily microaggressions into the story, concepts that have been thoughtfully discussed in non-fiction works like Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Me and White Supremacy. Like when I read Such a Fun Age, I wished I’d had a copy of Me and White Supremacy open beside me to be able to make those connections and bring those concepts to life.

Assembly isn’t an easy book, but that’s a good thing. It’s important, especially for white readers, to see the world through the narrator’s eyes, to understand how she experiences the world and to feel the anger, sadness, loneliness, and hopelessness that she feels. Assembly is a powerful book I’ll be recommending widely.

Thanks to Little Brown and Company and NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Assembly is a heavy little book. Brown writes about class, race, and life in general in such a sharp and biting way that she doesn't need a lot of pages to make an impact. Told through a series of vignette like memories and stories and set over the course of one day, Assembly captures the every day struggles of a black woman working in finance in the UK in a very universal way. The narrator describes situations and emotions that are so personal to her life but yet feel so real and well written it's impossible not to empathize with and relate to her. Brown magnificently writes the feelings of emptiness and hopelessness.

The story felt winding and a bit stream of consciousness which gave the lovely effect of being inside the narrator's mind as she went about it day. It felt unfiltered and raw in the best possible way. I will define revisiting this story.

I adored Assembly and am looking forward to seeing what Natasha Brown writes next.

This was an interesting and impactful book. It tells the story of a black British woman as she considers her current situation, including her personal relationships and career, what she wants from her future, and how she fits into the various worlds she inhabits. This was an insightful look at several important issues and how the intersection between the personal and the structural shapes people's lived experiences.

Recommended!

Absolutely amazing! I am astounded that this is a debut novel. This is such a tautly written, smartly crafted novel of a Black woman in London who has lived her entire life ascending the career path to heights that others are in awe of, challenging herself to be the absolute best and winning. We see her life and its richness as she is both at work, being promoted to share an important leadership position with a white man, and as she and her boyfriend plan a weekend in the country with his parents at their estate.

The tensions in the book are crisp. We see all the identity challenges- race, class, gender at play with nuance and thoughtfulness. And when something happens to our narrator to make her think about her trajectory, which she had worked so hard that it almost seems predestined, it was truly shocking.

This book deserves all the accolades it's receiving in the UK and I cannot wait to hand it to friends and beg them to read it.


***I* want to thank the publishers for their access to the digital ARC of this book in exchange for a fair review.

Wow! Even though this work is shorter than I like most of my fiction to be there is so much to unpack. This has been receiving a lot of positive buzz and now I see why. Primarily dealing with racism in a very personal and urgent way using stream of consciousness there are also additional topics confronted. The writing was impressive and I felt compelled to read from beginning to end in one sitting. I definitely look forward to the North American release of this much anticipated book. Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this drc available through netgalley.

This was an extremely short, more essay style book. It took an in depth look at race, class, and gender. While the style of prose was hard to get into at first, by the end I was in the flow of it. Well written and a unique glimpse into one person's perspective.

Any value my words have in this country is derived from my association with its institutions: universities, banks, government. I can only repeat their words and hope to convey a kind of truth.



I'm finding it difficult to review this book on its merits as a novel, when I think it may have done better as a creative nonfiction piece, or a personal essay. Of course, I have no idea how much the author shares with the nameless protagonist, but this felt less like a fictional narrative and more like someone writing out their frustrations (the author's bio does say she worked in financial services, just like the protagonist, so there's at least some commonalities).

Futures and children and purity -- not in any crass, racial sense, no. Of course not. It was a purity of lineage, of history: shared cultural mores and sensibilities. The preservation of a way of life, a class, the necessary higher echelon of society.



That's not to say that this wasn't a brilliant piece of writing; it definitely is. It's clever and incisive and very sharply written. But there's no real sense of narrative, only attempts at it: the unnamed narrator has a rich, white boyfriend, she has a sister, she may have cancer. But none of these things are ever explored fully, and the narrative itself is structured as a series of vignettes. One could argue that the shaky structure of the narrative is intentionally mirroring the breakdown of the protagonist's inner self, as she is clearly struggling, but there is just so much distance between her and the reader. Part of that distance also means that in some sections, I had a hard time grasping exactly what was going on; the writing is sometimes frustratingly opaque and abstract. There are also odd sections that feel straight out of an MFA program: overwrought, unnecessarily but intentionally "weird" descriptions, like a belabored description of someone chewing and swallowing.

Another problem is that the protagonist doesn't feel like a unique person, but rather an archetypal representation of a black woman working in a high-powered finance job. Her experiences and narrative are interesting, of course, but there's no personalization to it. That's not to say her narrative didn't resonate with me, but I think that's part of the problem: it resonated with me just like it would resonate with most POC, with nothing to really set it apart.

I have lived life by the principle that when I face a problem, I must work to find an action I can take to overcome it; or accommodate it; or forge a new path around it; excavate the ground beneath it, even. This is how I've been prepared. This is how we prepare ourselves, teach our children to approach this place of obstacle after obstacle. Work twice as hard. Be twice as good. And always, assimilate.



And there are opportunities to explore the individuality of the protagonist; she struggles with her complicity in capitalist heteropatriarchy, as she works at a bank, which she admits is a soulless institution, but she also wishes to achieve some kind of success and stability. This internal conflict could have been explored more!

Again, I can't help but feel this should have either been expanded further into a novel, or been condensed into some sort of nonfiction piece. There are some paragraphs that straight-up read like a manifesto (a manifesto I liked and agreed with, but still):


I’ve watched with dispassionate curiosity as this continent hacks away at itself: confused, lost, sick with nostalgia for those imperialist glory days – when the them had been so clearly defined! It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach – won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just viscous, random chance. ...

How do we examine the legacy of colonization when the basic facts of its construction are disputed in the minds of its beneficiaries?...How can we engage, discuss, even think through a post-colonial lens, when there's no shared base of knowledge? When even the simplest accounting of events -- as preserved in the country's own archives -- wobbles suspect as tin-foil-hat conspiracies in the minds of its educated citizens?



I mean, this is great stuff, but it feels so odd to include in what is ostensibly a novel, especially when it's incorporated without any clear relation to the narrative itself. (Also, regarding the above quote, the book also talks about Operation Legacy, which I had never heard of, but was apparently a program to destroy British documents relating to its colonies; specifically, documents that made the British government look bad. I'm...surprised is not the word for it, but I'm just kind of enraged that I had never heard of this, and that most people have probably not heard of it.

Anyway, despite these gripes, I still gave this a rounded up 3.5 stars because I very much enjoyed it! The curse of novellas is that they are often just too short for the narrative they want to tackle, and I think this novella struggled even more because it sort of straddled a weird line between various narrative styles, as though it wanted to experiment with them all. I kind of wish it had picked one side and committed to it, for an overall stronger piece of writing, but I would still recommend this, especially given how short it is.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the chance to read this in advance of publication.

I did not know what to expect after reading the description for this one but decided to go ahead and give it a shot after reading some other reviews.

I immediately enjoyed the stream of consciousness style of the writing and getting to see the main character's world and experiences through her direct point of view - in her mind. It is extremely interesting to experience the world as she does and in a lot of ways it opened my eyes to the Black female experience and forces the reader to really look inward and reflect. The story touches on very important themes of race, sexism and social class, among others.

It's very short and perhaps I wish it was a tad longer, but overall I thought this was a very nice debut from this author. I found the "fractured" style of writing a little confusing at times if I'm being totally honest, and it's not something I would typically pick up, but overall I did enjoy it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Co. for the ARC.

Wow, this is good.
The narrator, a young professional Black Woman in banking, is out of place in this predominantly White male industry. Yet she has proven herself capable by being twice as good and twice as polite, while others show they have twice as many faces, or throw out twice as much racist abuse. On a trip to her boyfriend’s family estate for a weekend in the country, she is questioning her future.

The writing is spare and clear. The narrator is in her own head throughout. Because of her destination, her work, and an appointment earlier, her thoughts are choppy, but at least they are her own.

This is a perfect explanation of systemic racism, especially toward Black Women. It is set in the UK, but could be set in any country with mostly Whites. It is heartbreaking in its message.

Natasha Brown's Assembly tells the tale of a black British woman anticipating a trip to her white boyfriend's family estate. The success of the novel is in its harmonious way of having the narrator's thoughts affect the prose's construction. As Brown takes liberty offering fragmented thoughts to best reflect her feelings, we understand that the narrator is suspicious of how she presents herself into being known: outwardly in consideration to her boyfriend and her family or, as she discovers, inwardly with the capabilities of her own body, Brown leads the reader through a compact and effective story that demonstrates skillful execution with some thought provoking tendencies. Assembly is a short novel that contributes to how readers can think about the societal and personal implications in how reading offers accountability and self-reflection.

This is one of those "it's not you, it's me" books. It is clever (maybe almost TOO clever?) and has some really interesting things to say. However, the format and writing did not work for me at all. I often struggle with highly literary, experimental fiction because it can feel like it's trying really hard to be smart. I had some of the same feelings with Patricia Lockwood's "No One Is Talking About This" though I found that to be easier to consume because of it's formatting which made for an overall more enjoyable reading experience for me. I'd also heard this compared to Raven Leilani's "Luster" and I absolutely do not see that comparison at all. So if that is something that pulls you in, just be warned that I don't think it's an apt comparison.

What Brown does is very intentional, I just didn't enjoy it. She writes the story in fragments and also a very depersonalized style that kept me at such a distance from the characters. On top of that, it turns into more of an essay at times, and I felt like I lost the focus of the story in this moments. Because it is such a short novel, those essayistic sections felt like they didn't get enough time to be fully developed, and they took away from the fictional parts that I was more curious about.

All in all, I had to go back and re-read some of the earlier sections and I still don't think I fully understand what happened. People clearly love this book, so I'm chalking this up to not being right for me. I would still recommend it to people because it's so thought-provoking and I'd love to talk to people about it, hear their interpretations and get their opinions. But it's not one I'm super compelled by and eager to revisit.

It is incredible what Natasha Brown was able to do in such little space. For fans of contemporary fragmentary literature, Brown offers a considered dissection, analysis, and indictment of white supremacy as we follow the thoughts of a successful Black woman working in finance in London. There is a level of stakes added to the plot as we follow her mind leading up to a visit to her boyfriend’s parents’ house, which left me reeling by upon closing the book. A must read. I will be shocked if this is not on the Booker longlist.

112 pages. I read it in one sitting. Not because this was an easy read, or a plot-driven page turner. But it demanded my attention and I had to read it without an interlude, could not step away from the internal world of the narrator as she travels into the dark night of her soul.

Natasha Brown’s Assembly is startling, original, and unsettling.

A young woman has arrived. She has a high power job, a posh life, a boyfriend with a rich heritage. But, cost is too much to bear. She is exhausted.

It’s how the men at work treat her, how strangers come on to her. It’s how she must be in constant control to project the right image. It’s how she is a made an example of success.

Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable.
from Assembly by Natasha Brown

She is a black woman in Britain. And that makes all the difference. A person of color from a previously colonized country. Her very color is a stigma. Her very success makes her a target for white jealously and hate.

She struggles with a life or death question, keeping the news secret from her boyfriend who takes her to his ancestral home and imagines a life together.

Why endure my own dehumanization?
from Assembly by Natasha Brown

As an American, I had not realized how in 2021 British view people from the countries they once dominated and plundered, that ‘keep Britain white’ and ‘go home’ were chants of hate.

Confronted by the truth of one woman’s life, we reevaluate our own story, our own culture, and our own participation in systemic racism.

Readers of the best literary fiction will love this novel.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

There have been so many books about race and racism lately. And because it’s such a loaded, difficult subject to discuss, these books don’t always succeed. This one does, though, stunningly.
It’s such a slender volume, such a quick read that it’s surprising how much of an emotional punch the author managed to throw with it.
The narrative is done through a stream of consciousness of a black British woman, a descendant of East Indies people who came to England when England needed them to recover from WWII and were met with great unfairness and racism, despite every attempt at assimilation. But this book’s narrator got it made, did all the right things, followed all the right roads to success, has done so in face of every cutting comment, every ignorant prejudice. Now she has a career, money, a white boyfriend from a well to do family…a precisely assembled life that no longer seems worth living. After years and years of struggling against the current, she appears ready to give in. Which is the saddest, most poignant thing of it all.
So yeah, not an easy read by any means, but a powerhouse of a one. And a fine example of thought and emotion stirring entry into the conversation about racism. Thanks Netgalley.

Assembly, by Natasha Brown, is a beautiful, poetic novella, about an abhorrent topic - racism. This book made me absolutely furious, and I rolled my eyes at some characters so often I feared I would never be able to see again.

Our unnamed narrator is an independently wealthy young woman, working in The City (a vomit-worthy term, basically meaning London’s financial district). She is Black, and this quickly becomes apparent through the hostility her male colleagues bestow upon her, hinting she has it “easier” in a world that likes to be seen as diverse. Our narrator is also suffering from a cancer scare, and the similarities between the illness eating away at her flesh, and the racism eroding her soul, are staggering.

Our narrator has had to assimilate to get to her current position, and as a result has picked up some particularly odious acquaintances. Her closest female friend, Rach, is vapid, and once called our narrator from the Hermes store, crying at the beauty of it all.

Her boyfriend, however, is a real piece of work. The only thing I ever-so-slightly questioned in this book is how a successful, bright woman ended up with such a moron. His constant references to how rich she is clearly shows how uncomfortable he is with the situation. The dichotomy of her earned wealth and his inherited wealth is apparent; she worked harder than he ever will, yet he is handed every privilege based purely on the family into which he was born.

But the central voice is just incredible. She sees the injustice, she sees the system built on racism, and the desperation of those at the top to keep the hierarchy in place. She knows she is better than all these idiots, but she has to “play the game”. Author Natasha Brown has years of experience in the Finance industry, and I would wager that a lot of her writing is based on real experience. The prose is so clear, and hugely intelligent. I would love to see this adapted for the stage; it would make a great monologue.

Assembly is a quick, immersive read, and so incredibly vital. It is devastating because it’s utterly believable.

Many thanks to Little, Brown, and Co and NetGalley for the advanced copy! This is a book about areas of a black woman’s life written through stream of consciousnesses. The writing style is unlike anything I've read and I flew through it. Very important topics on racism, classism, and sexism throughout. Highly recommend.

This is such a fast read it's difficult to know if that's a good thing or not: the story is stream-of-consciousness, which can get tiring but the story is so powerful that longer would have been ok. Even people not well versed in the British class system can understand our unnamed narrator's story, from her working class childhood as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants to her white-collar job in finance, her boyfriend from the "right" schools, etc.. Can she bridge that gap with his parents? Does she even want to? So much to think about here, with small details that will keep returning to you long after you've finished reading.

eARC provided by publisher via Netgalley.

Assembly is structured as a collection of loosely connected introspective thoughts of a young British woman of color who has (by society’s standards) attained “success:” She has attained a degree from an esteemed university, has secured a coveted leadership position at a prominent financial institution, owns her home, and is outwardly succeeding financially and socially - yet, she’s an emotional wreck.

In essence, she’s succumbing to a lifetime of internal and external pressure to conform, excel, and take advantage of the opportunities that were denied her ancestors. Compound this angst with subtle microaggressions in and out of the workplace, the daily headlines steeped in racism and xenophobia (nationally and globally), and the burden of fulfilling a “superwoman” type of role model - one she didn’t ask for and no longer wants to play. In totality, all of this has left her exhausted and a bit apathetic. She is the corporation’s “living proof” of diversity and feels guilty perpetuating the “be best, work hard, etc.” propaganda to the next generation. She thinks, “Best case: those children grow up, assimilate, get jobs and pour money into a government that forever tells them they are not British.”

While this is a work of contemporary fiction, the narrator’s observations and critiques are timely and spot on. I highlighted many passages throughout this short novel because her reflections on race, assimilation, acceptance, British nationalism, classism, corporate politics offer food for thought that will linger on the mental palate long after closing the book. Well done!

This is a book about different scenes of a black woman’s life deconstructed via stream of consciousness. Micro aggressions and racism on display as she makes her way through society. I honestly loved it it’s very different writing style but beautiful, lyrical almost.