Assembly cover art

Assembly

The critically acclaimed debut novel

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Assembly

By: Natasha Brown
Narrated by: Pippa Bennett-Warner
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Step out into a world of Go Home vans. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy a flat. 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?

'Diamond-sharp, timely and urgent' Observer, Best Debuts of 2021

'Subtle, elegant, scorching... The literary debut of the summer' Vogue

'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

'Exquisite, daring, utterly captivating. A stunning new writer' Bernardine Evaristo

'One of the most talked-about debuts of the year . . . You'll read it in one sitting' Sunday Times Style

'Expertly crafted, remarkable, astonishing... A literary debut with flavours of Jordan Peele's Get Out' Bookseller, Editor's Choice

'Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway meets Citizen by Claudia Rankine... As breathtakingly graceful as it is mercilessly true' Olivia Sudjic

'Bold and original, with a cool intelligence, and so very truthful about the colonialist structure of British society' Diana Evans

'This marvel of a novel manages to say all there is to say about Britain today' Sabrina Mahfouz

© Natasha Brown 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature

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Critic reviews

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
A quiet, measured call to revolution. It's about everything that has changed and still needs to change, socially, 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
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
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
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
All stars
Most relevant
An incredibly striking novel where every single word is perfectly, deftly placed. The author has so carefully depicted what it is like to exist at the intersection of all these identities.

Phenomenal debut

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Very basic narrative. In the end I wish it had been longer with more structure because I think the author is so powerful in her writing

Beautifully read, powerfully written

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Astonishingly moving. It breaks my heart to read these struggles still present among such success.

Heartbreaking Read

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I really wanted to know what it could be like to be a highly educated black person, a minority in a sea of whites in an atmosphere of 'diversity'. My reaction is one of recoil against the indirect sarcasm of a girl expecting not to be treated as different. She is after all different in so many ways that wallowing in her outrage against pretty much everything seems to me ridiculous. Caught in trap of moral indignation against not belonging, being an outsider, being the odd one out , when inevitably, she actually is. Her way of dealing with it is to become contemptuous of those around her naturally treading on eggshells trying to avoid the race, class, privilege barrier. I felt no sympathy and am left angry that the tone of this whole story, though brilliantly conceived, is plain mockery.

A bit of a shock

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this is such an excellent, painfully beautiful book. I can see myself reading/listening to it many more times, and I will recommend it.

incredible

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