Sit anywhere, they gesture towards the arrangement of sofas and armchairs. They take me through to a cosy, carpeted side room with a crackling fire. The mother, Helen, rubs her son’s shoulder. A radiator-bench hulks against one wall of their wide entryway. Helen and George-first names, as they insist-bundle me inside. Miniature lamp posts cast narrow yellow cones, illuminating a path up towards the house. The wrought-iron entry gate has slid back into a closed grimace. Outside, it’s quiet and oppressively still. In the dim light, I see earnestness in his features.

With the biopsy, all that stuff-he pauses and turns to me. Beyond, across the lawn, a few windows glow orange against the night. We’re parked on the gravel driveway outside his parents’ house. “Thank you,” he says into the sudden silence of the stopped engine. She developed Assembly after receiving a 2019 London Writers Award in the literary fiction category. Brown has spent a decade working in financial services, after studying Maths at Cambridge University. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.The following is excerpted from Natasha Brown's novel Assembly. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. Suffused with its contemporary moment, with references to the police killing of Philando Castille and the white nationalist resurgence in Britain, Assembly is fundamentally a reminder that the sun has yet to set on the imperial mindset, and that the black body and the black intellect still do not register within that logic.Ĭhris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. Negating of her agency, her accumulated wealth and status, her education, her citizenship, and ultimately of her bare life. The result is a work of literary fiction that is profoundly beautiful, with passages of poetic form and lyrical description of a world that her narrator experiences as ultimately negating. Natasha has gone to the novel’s primary function-its vision into the inner life of a character-and she has brought it to bear on the precariousness of black life. An interview with Natasha Brown, winner of the London Writers Award, and author of Assembly(Little Brown, 2021), the story of a young black British woman, marked by success in education and work, who asks a fundamental question: does my country care whether or I live or die? At a mere one hundred and two pages, Assembly manages to evoke more feeling, more sensorial reality than many novels twice its length.

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