Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility. When the narrator explains her career choice, she does so with icy matter-of-factness, an explanation that is also an indictment: 'Banks - I understood what they were. Here the reader must supply the precipitating question thus, the reader becomes a kind of participant. The chapter 'What It's Like,' presented in the third person, begins, 'No, but originally. Rather than describe herself, the narrator records what other people say about her. Brown allows the connection between the third- and first-person sections to stay slightly unclear, perhaps to highlight the way that this woman's story is part of a broader, relentless narrative. When a woman is subjected to uninvited attention at work, Brown writes, 'there was he the subject and her the object.' The 'object' notes her colleague's descriptions of her body: 'her hair (wild), her skin (exotic), her blouse (barely containing those breasts).' The reader can assume this 'object' is, in fact, the novel's subject, the first-person narrator whose voice appears several pages later, addressing a school assembly about her work at the bank. How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp.In the fragmented, urgent chapters of 'Assembly,' Natasha Brown's debut, the narrator often chooses to 'detach' in order to survive the pressures in her life: a banking career in London, where she is a minority in various ways a relationship with a man of a different race and class a diagnosis of cancer, which she keeps to herself. Also: what she learned from studying Maths at university (yes, she's one of a select bunch of novelists with a Maths degree, including David Foster Wallace.).Īssembly by Natasha Brown is now out in paperback and available here: We also discuss how she feels about failure given her objective levels of success, the concept of separating your own identity from what it is you do, race as a construct and what 'privilege' really means (if anything). She talks to me about failures in social media, learning French and a tele-sales job that taught her about the power of language itself. She is so wise, clever and emotionally intelligent. When I first met Natasha, I knew I had to get her on the podcast. It tells the story of an unnamed Black British woman working at a bank in the city, who is confronted with the numbing aggression of racist encounters and systems as she confronts a life-or-death It was shortlisted for both the Folio and the Goldsmiths Prize, as well as being named the Foyles Bookshop Book of the Year. Assembly runs to 100-pages and has already been compared to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

Natasha Brown is the author behind one of my favourite novels of recent years.

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