In Natasha Brown’s debut novel Assembly, a carefully crafted identity begins to come apart. When a successful Black woman receives unsettling news, she considers the constituent parts of her life: her high-paying job in finance, her prestigious education, her white boyfriend. Having formed herself into a success story, she finds her life reduced to the narrative white society demands of her. Ultimately, Brown’s narrator is forced to decide the price she is willing to pay to undo the structures which limit her, and reclaim agency over her circumstances. A poetic and concise examination of race, gender, and class, the work refuses to look away from the power relations comprising the core of the modern world. 

About the speaker:

Natasha Brown is a British novelist. She was a 2019 London Writers Award recipient, a 2022 Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, and a Women’s Prize x Good Housekeeping Futures Award finalist. Assembly (2021) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction.

Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Brown will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.

This conversation will be followed by a catered reception.

This event requires advance registration.

Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.