Take a closer look at our Fiction Book of the Year 2021: Assembly by Natasha Brown, available now in a signed exclusive edition. Numbered out of just 1000 copies, with gold foiled cover detail and signed by the author, the Foyles Book of the Year edition is a celebration of a novel that deserves a place on every reader’s shelves. Published in June, and quickly becoming one of our bestselling and most-recommended new works of literary fiction, Natasha Brown’s debut is a slim, razor-sharp novel with not a spare sentence, artfully melding first-person narration with a poet’s touch and the influence of cultural texts—the story of a young Black British woman striving to hold herself together as the world threatens to break her apart. The unnamed protagonist would seem to have it all: high-flying corporate career, talk of promotion, inspirational talks to schoolchildren and the prospect of marriage ahead. But underneath it, everything is a trade: she’s used as a token of diversity at work, a liberal prop by her old-money boyfriend, and racism, sexism and workplace harassment abound. As she prepares for a weekend at her partner’s family home, she finds herself questioning the life she has made: what a woman needs to do to ‘make it’, and how a Black woman succeeds in a country built on empire; where her boyfriend’s ancestral wealth came from, and her own complicity in a capitalist career. And the diagnosis that lurks, driving her on, as the novel slips across the present and history, and prose slipping into poetry and all of it pushing in. A dazzling explosion of writing talent, a compelling descent into a devastating maelstrom and an ensemble of characters that burst across the page; a gripping, gut-punch novel and a fresh formal shake-up of structure and narrative time. It is, as Olivia Sudjic says, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway meets Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—and it’s entirely Natasha Brown’s Assembly, and it’s a disassembly, a tearing-apart and coming-back-together; it’s a hand-grenade, smuggled into the quiet seat of a country, where vestiges of colonial power reside. Signed and numbered exclusive edition of Assembly by Natasha Brown is signed by the author and numbered out of 1000, with exclusive gold foiled cover detail. Available while stock lasts.

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• ISBN: 2369537079506