Assembly by Natasha Brown

Today’s book is author Natasha Brown’s first novel.  It caused quite a stir in the literary world when it was published in 2019.

The book is set in the late summer of 2019. The blurb on the back cover of the novel reads:
Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Step out into a world of GoHome vans. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy a flat. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going.

This slim experimental novel is about the experience of overt sexual harassment and latent racism of a young, successful, black woman working in the financial sector, and its effect on her life.

Music played:
Nine to Five sung by Dolly Parton, from the soundtrack of the film of the same name. It’s all about the perils of the work environment for women.

Book recommendations from Reading Circle members:

• Franz Werfel, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.  The seminal novel of the Armenian genocide, Franz Werfel’s bestselling 1933 epic brought the catastrophe to the world’s attention and has become a talismanic story in the face of hatred. An allegory of deportations and political suppressions worldwide. A stunning epic with an arresting ending.
• Paul Auster:
  Baumgartner – A tender masterpiece of love, memory and loss by one of the world’s great writers.
  The Invention of Solitude – A moving and personal meditation on fatherhood.
• Emmanuelle Carrere:  Limonov A 2011 ‘biographical novel’, based on the life of Eduard Limonov, a Russian politician and opposition figure, as well as a poet and novelist. As much an historical and sociological approach to 20th century Russia as it is a complex non-fiction narrative based on the life of a living person.
• Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek Finance Minister):
  Technofeudalism – In his boldest and most far-reaching book yet, this world-famous economist argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun.
  Another Now:  Dispatches From an Alternative Present – What would a fair and equal   society look like? The author presents his radical and subversive answer.
• Jon Fosse (Norwegian Nobel Prize for Literature winner): Aliss at the Fire – a visionary masterpiece, a haunting exploration of love and loss that ranks among the greatest meditations on marriage and human fate.
• Matt Haig: The Midnight Library – A fantasy novel about choosing different ways of living. ‘The only way to learn is to live’.