Sharp, smart and carefully crafted, Assembly is a novella which packs a lot of punch in its pages. The comparisons to Claudia Rankine and Jenny Offill are well-warranted: you can tell from the first few lines that Brown is not a writer to be underestimated. I found myself repeatedly highlighting sentences, a little in awe at the way she manages to capture complex experiences so precisely.

Assembly is an intense and impressive debut: definitely one to watch.

Very thought provoking and unique book with strong leading voice. I think I will be thinking about this one for some time to come

Assembly by Natasha Brown is a short novel that explores issues of race and gender through the narrator's experiences in the workplace and in her relationship with her boyfriend and his family.

Assembly is a short, carefully crafted novel about an unnamed narrator preparing for a garden party at her boyfriend's parents' country house. The narrator, a Black British woman who works in the City, reflects on her assimilation into the world that it seemed she should aspire to, as she travels from work in central London to the house in the country, and watches the reactions of those around her, including her boyfriend and his parents.

Written in an immediate style that quickly moves between thoughts (like other recent literary fiction in a similar vein, also often focusing on a workplace or woman's position in the world), Assembly draws you into questions of race and class and the decisions people make like an observer pulled in too close. The result is a fascinating look at ideas of millennial success (the narrator owns a flat in London, has health insurance, has money) and what it takes to get there (work too hard, always be scared, and still have to be a diversity role model, standing up to tell people to follow you). At the same time, there's the fact that the narrator will never actually 'get there', because she will never be seen as the same as others in her office, in the society her boyfriend and his family socialise in, and in myriad other situations, due to race and gender and who gets to be seen as "British".

The cutting, even disorientating style and the short length of the novel work well to not find solutions or answer questions, whether about the narrator's life and what she will do after the moments shown in the novel, or about the questions of becoming the 'right' sort of person. The book addresses the latter directly as the narrator confronts the idea of why she's working in finance rather than something more progressive or at least not directly building class inequality. There are no easy solutions, but the narrator is trying to take control of her own story, at least.

Assembly is short, engrossing literary fiction that plays with race, class, and belonging in modern Britain. I found it easier to get into the style than with other books with similar style, and the structure building up to a moment before the party began gave it a real sense of precision and that it went exactly where it was planning to.

Reading this book made me feel uncomfortable in a good way. It challenged my beliefs and it gave me a new perspective to think about things I thought I already knew.

What an amazing, thought provoking read . So much packed into so short a book. I will be thinking about this long after reading.

So blinded I was by the 'for fans of Raven Leilani' that I did notice the 'and Jenny Offill' that followed. And it's just my luck but style-wise Assembly shares far more with the latter than the former.
I struggled my way through Assembly, trying to understand what was going and who was saying what. It was like reading something by Offill + Rachel Cusk with a dash of Zadie Smith. That is to say, Assembly was not for me.

I found this book confusing for the sake of being confusing , the lack of quotation marks was inconsistent (a few lines here and there have them...and these lines don't really bear any more weight that other lines of dialogue so, why do they get quotation mark?) and a clear attempt at using an 'in' style (I blame Rooney for making this a trend again), the weird way in which characters would be addressed made it hard for me to figure out who was talking about who or who the protagonist was referring to, and the constant scene-shifting was so a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g.

There were things that I appreciated. The tone for one: the unnamed young Black woman narrating this book is by turns angry and exhausted by the hypocritical behaviour of her white acquaintances and colleagues, by many white British people's denial of racism in the UK (the kind of people who usually accuse others of being racist for acknowledging the existence of institutional racism in their country), by Brexit and slogans such as 'Britain for the British', by the knowledge that no matter what she will achieve there will always be someone ready to dismiss her accomplishments or hard-work by crying 'diversity token'.
The snatches of dialogues I did manage to follow rang true to life and I could sadly too easily envision people who say things such as 'I'm all for diversity but [insert inane complaint here]' or someone who attempts to equate their experience of being a white woman or growing up in a white working class family to being a person of color in a predominantly white country (on the lines of 'I too am oppressed').

There isn't a story as such. Some passages were set in our narrator's workplace (I would call her character but she is not really a character) after she's received a promotion, in other passages, a doctor is talking to her about 'options' and 'treatments', and we have passages in which she is thinking about or in the vicinity of her rich white boyfriend who is never fleshed out but a mere abstraction of a person. The author often approached these scenes through rather odd angles, so that my reading experience was marked by a sense of disorientation.

There was the odd clever line or piercing observation but these were drowned by the author's stylised prose which flirted with narrative modes such as stream of consciousness. The author's style lacks subtlety, nuance. Perhaps if I'd never read anything by Danzy Senna I would have found Assembly to be subversive and sharp but I just found it trying. This book really wants to be clever and different but it misses the mark. Many of the paragraphs seemed just struck me as contrived and not particularly inventive. Sometimes less is more:
“Her jaw grinds rhythmically, bulging and elongating; tendons, emerging taut, flicker up past her ear into greying wisps of hair. By her temple, a bone or cartilage or some other hard aspect of her bobs and strains against the stretched-white skin. The entire side of her face is engaged in this elaborate mechanical action until, climactically, the soft-hung skin of her neck contracts familiar and the ground-down-mushed-up toast, saliva and butter, worked into a paste, squeezes down; is forced through the pulsing oesophagus, is swallowed.”

What next? Are we going to dedicate a whole paragraph to the act of excreting? Such powerful and raw writing! Look, I could sort of see what this was trying to do (it will make readers feel a sense of discomfort, abjection) but Natasha Brown lays it on a bit thick.

While Assembly certainly touches on important and topical issues, what could have been an astute and fervent commentary on race, gender, and class in Britain, Brown ends up sacrificing substance for style. I'm just glad I did not actually pay to read this as I will probably forget all about it in a few weeks (whereas I still think of Leilani's Luster).
If you are a fan of Offill, Cusk, Smith or even Jo Hamya's Three Rooms, you should probably give Assembly. If you are looking for the next Luster my advice is this, keep on looking because Assembly sure isn't it.

A taut and pacy debut on what it means to be a black woman in 21st century Britain. The protagonist takes the reader on a journey of daily examples of her experience with sexism and racism, viewed in the context of her personal relationships and her job; the exhaustion she feels in trying to assimilate herself into a world where she is made to feel she doesn't belong is palpable, with the tension building as the novel progresses.

I think this is going to be a buzzy book of the summer, and I expect to see it on some longlists for literary prizes. Short, but packs a heavy punch. Recommended.

This book wasn't for me, but I think a lot of other readers will like it and find it to be a powerful and timely work. It's very short - basically a novella - and could almost be read as a long short story. The book says really important things about race and capitalism in UK - the futility of striving, the impossibility of 'assimilation', the exhaustion and pointlessness of it. It's a good counterpoint to a book like <i>little scratch</i>, also about 21st-century office life.

The writing is intelligent, icy, and cold (in a good way), and reminded me of Olivia Sudjic and Gwendoline Riley. Overall the book often read as an essay, which is fine, but my personal taste is for more traditional 'fiction,' so ultimately this wasn't a good match for me (which is my fault, and not the author's). The book is aware of this - there's a passage near the end where the narrator reflects on how people want her to <i>sugarcoat the rhetoric, embed the politics within a story, make it relatable, personal... Shape my truth into a narrative arc.</i> It's a clever move, for the book to acknowledge what it DOESN'T do. I am interested in seeing what the author writes next.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

To be a woman in the modern world is to have limitations. To be a black woman is to have more limitations.

I found this hard to warm to. Thankfully, it was a short read

This book is hard to describe, That doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it I would say it’s the female person of color Catcher in the Rye. Told in first person narrative stream of consciousness you see the micro and macro aggressions of a female person of color in today’s society.

I have been reading quite some non-fiction titles on race, gender and identity and yet this book manages to convey more on only 100 pages. If this is a debut, the future sure looks bright!

This is a fierce debut from Brown who gives us a forceful portrait of a young Black British woman who's just had enough. The page number is scant (I read this in under two hours) but the impact is compelling as the protagonist rehearses the crushing effects of racism, misogyny, capitalism and class and how, despite her complicity with the social mobility narrative - university, City job, own flat - she's bypassing her own needs and acculturating others into the very dissatisfactions that haunt her own mind and body.

References are light-touch to so many of today's hot issues: from micro-aggressions to in-your-face racial abuse; from women still being expected to make the coffee and book the tickets in the office to workplace sexual harassment; from the denial that systemic racism exists to the way Britain's imperial history has been expunged from the national curriculum ('how can we engage, discuss, even think through a post-colonial lens, when there's no shared base of knowledge?')

There is a central figure/metaphor around which the book is built that doesn't quite come off but wow, it's powerful. This has more impact than many books three or four times the length - a book that sort of crashes into the reader with brute strength.