11th February 2025 – Assembly by Natasha Brown

Here is a short sharp shock of a novel about the kind of person the UK government’s recent commission on race would have wanted to profile in their report. Natasha Brown’s virtuosic debut follows a British woman who is preparing to attend a party, and who is musing about her life and her place in the world as she does. Comparisons with Mrs Dalloway would be neither unwarranted nor, I suspect, unwelcome.

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”, even though Brown has restricted herself to an astonishingly small quota of words in doing so. To say that Assembly is slight would be an understatement: not only is it barely even novella-sized, it is also organised into vignettes, so that its already meagre portion of language is threaded through what seems comparatively like acres of space. The effect is to require readers to supply the connective tissue necessary to turn it into narrative – text that is sparse on the page expands on consumption; it swells like a sponge in the mind.

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