Assembly (2021)

By Natasha Brown

100pp, Fiction

Notes

2024-04-18

So nice to read something really good (and short) after that last sprawling mess! Via a series of brief vignettes within 100 short pages Natasha Brown builds both a convincing and memorable character and a powerful critique of modern Britain.

A young black woman, a sucessful banker and fully fledged memeber of the 0.1%, travels to her white old-money boyfriends house for a lavish family get together. We experience the action through a Virginia Woolf-ish interior monologue, recounting a suffocating reality; all her success is viewed as contingent, she's relentlessly objectified and more. Brown has an amazing eye for detail and ear language a skill that provides an easy insight into a character whos experience and ambition couldn't be further from my own (given there's probaly only a few years age difference and we live in the same city).

All this in 100 pages!

Aside: I feel like there's a general trend for books getting longer, tempted to investigate.