Natasha Brown Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Natasha Brown is a literary fiction author from the United Kingdom that is best known for her debut work “Assembly” which she published in 2021. Since the time she published her first novel, she has become a critically acclaimed author.
She has been in the running for the most prestigious United Kingdom award for debut novelists in the 2022 Desmond Elliot Prize.

The award usually comes with a prize of 10,000 pounds in addition to a full year of support from the National Centre for Writing.

Before she became the critically acclaimed author that she is today, Brown spent more than ten years working in finance. Before that, she had attended Cambridge University where she studied Mathematics.

Her debut novel follows the life and times of a Black British woman working in finance even though she has asserted that her novel is not autobiographical.

The work tells the stories that we live within those of freedom and safety, losers and winners, class and race, and a woman daring to take control of her own story even if it would cost her life.

She began penning her novel when she won the literary fiction category at the London Writers Award in 2019.

Brown was brought up in London and during her childhood, she was a big reader who used to spend many of her summers dawdling over the books on her grandparent’s huge bookshelf.

While she loved reading as a child, she would decide to study mathematics in college. Ever since she became a published author she has joined the list of authors who studied Maths such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

For the most part, it was her father who loved Mathematics and encouraged her to study the subject. Deemed one of the hardest subjects of human knowledge, she loved studying it, even if much of it did not have real-world application.

Nonetheless, she performed exceptionally well in college and would go on to practice in finance. Given that she graduated when the world was still experiencing the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis, she got a job with the typical issues.
It was a generic workspace that had all manner of problems from misogyny to racism. Still, it was the only place she ever worked and hence, her experience may be colored by this fact.

It would be from these experiences that she would later get the inspiration for her debut novel.

Natasha Brown spent more than ten years in finance, writing took a backseat during this time.

After spending years at college working on theorems, she decided to study linguistics and particularly the foundational texts by the likes of Ferdinand de Saussure.

She also loved to read Roland Barthes as his ideas on how language is sometimes used to depoliticize or politicize history and ideas resonated with her experiences.

She decided that she needed to use her experiences to write about the many problems in her workplace.

However, she knew that it would be difficult to find any publisher willing to publish a nonfiction work in the mold she wanted to write her book.

There were a lot more people qualified to give their opinions on the politics of language while she had never written anything, not even a short story.

Brown’s only way to get published was to write autofiction as he believed it would have much more appeal for the gatekeepers.

Moreover, it was also more flexible with style as it allowed for anything from bursts of poetic language, to essay-like digressions, and quotes and lists. She thus classifies her debut work of fiction as autofiction rather than an autobiography.

Like most authors, she began writing her debut work, while she was working full-time. After she was done outlining she promised herself to write at least 100 words every day until she was done.

During this time, she used to live in London’s Mile End from where she used to commute to work. She would wake up very early, brew a large pot of coffee and proceed to write for an hour before she left to catch the tube to head into the city.
Since she had never written, writing 100 words was a chore and often took her at least an hour or sometimes longer. Moreover, she used to edit as she went which is something that new writers are often told not to do.

During the weekends, she used to plan what she would write the following week and edit what she had written the previous week. She also spent much of her holidays writing, even as she cast the gym and her social life aside.
She would ultimately be rewarded when she published her debut in 2021.

Natasha Brown’s novel “Assembly” is a stunning literary work that is an incisive, succinct, and erudite exploration of misogyny, race, capitalism, British history, slavery, and colonialism.

The author also explores the never-ending microaggressions that people of color and particularly Black women from working-class backgrounds have to deal with.

The lead has done all that she can to get to the highest ranks of the investment bank that has employed her.

On top of all her achievements, she is about to be ushered into the highest strata of society as he gets married to a white boyfriend who has privilege and old money.

She is just about to head to the anniversary party of her boyfriend’s parents on their estate out in the country. She knows she should be happy and excited but she is feeling exhausted.
She has always had many health issues but for the first time in her life, she feels a sense of power and agency. Could the marriage she is about to enter into be one compromise too far?
In what may best be described as a stream of consciousness, she brings together the pieces of her experience that have made it possible for her to ascend the heights.

The lead removes any illusion of British equality, justice, and tolerance as she lays bare the unpalatable truths about never being accepted for being black in a very white society.