This visionary and unflinching novel is about a black woman who has spent her life carefully navigating cutthroat worlds of privilege in her career and relationships—until one day she is pulled up short by a life and death decision. Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Go to college, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things . Buy an apartment. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going. The narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart? Assembly is a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers. And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life. With a steely, unfaltering gaze, Natasha Brown dismantles the mythology of whiteness, lining up the debris in a neat row and walking away. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Top Ten Books of the Year LOS ANGELES TIMES Most Anticipated Books of the Fall One of THE ATLANTIC’s 20 Best Books of the Year THE WASHINGTON POST Best Books of September LIT HUB Most Anticipated Books of the Year POPSUGAR Best Books of September ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Best Books of September ESSENCE Best Books of Fall OPRAH QUARTERLY, Must Read Books of Fall THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Best Books of September THE MILLIONS Most Anticipated Books of September SHONDALAND, Best Fall Reads MS. MAGAZINE, Best September Reads TOWN & COUNTRY, Must Read Books of Fall One of GOOP’s 12 Best Books of the Year “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 “Mind-bending and utterly original. Assembly is like Thomas Bernhard in the key of Rachel Cusk but about black subjectivity.” ― BRANDON TAYLOR, author of REAL LIFE and FILTHY ANIMALS “The narrator of this tightly conceived and distinctively written debut novel is perceptive, precise and unsparing with her words…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, especially the steady, gnawing stream of racial and sexual harassment she faces. At only 100 pages, the book moves at an almost dizzying speed… 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.” ― NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “[A] crisp debut...As well as being a shrewd exploration of the psychological toll of generational trauma and colonial legacies, the book is also, thanks to its biting humor, a broad criticism of the absurdity of contemporary life.”― THE NEW YORKER “Natasha Brown’s debut novel is propelled by elegant, elliptical, violent lines like that. Its story, on the surface, is sparse….There is a pointed plot twist I won’t spoil, but what makes Assembly singular, in the end, is less its story than the manner of its storytelling. The narrator’s assessments of her life, rendered primarily in the first person, are studies of evocative contrasts. She reveals, and she withholds. She observes, and she watches herself being observed. She documents the casual cruelties that shape her daily life—and she defies them.”― THE ATLANTIC, the 20 Best Books of the Year “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.” ― ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (Best Books of September) “ Assembly is brilliant. Brown’s gaze is piercing. Each sentence is a perfectly polished jewel.”― AVNI DOSHI, author of BURNT SUGAR “A modern Mrs. Dalloway …a short sharp shock of a novel… 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’ …Text that is sparse on the page expands on consumption; it swells like a sponge in the mind… 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 bounda
