Assembly by Natasha Brown – #ABookADayInMay Day 1

A Book A Day In May is back! Inspired by Madame Bibi, it’s my annual attempt to finish a book a day through the month of May – though I already know the final few days won’t really be possible, but let’s start anyway. Usually, I try to do this challenge entirely spontaneously. This year, I decided to pull lots of potential titles off my shelves and pile them up on the dining table. I think there are about 70 books there now, so I have plenty of choice and still a lot of scope for surprise, but slightly less manic pulling titles off shelves. First up is Natasha Brown’s widely reviewed and critically lauded debut, Assembly (2021). It’s quite bold for a debut novelist to write something 100-pages-long – such a short book usually doesn’t do well, but there is also a confidence in the spare way that she has approached such a zeitgeisty topic. For, in Assembly, Brown tackles one black woman’s experience of often-subtle racism in a world where unspoken privilege is everything. The unnamed…