Assembly by Natasha Brown

 

We never learn the name of the narrator of this novel, but we know a lot about her and her life.  She is a black British woman, the daughter and granddaughter of Jamaican immigrants.  She is brilliant and worked to get scholarships that allowed her to graduate with high degrees.  She has worked in financial services and banking and has just gotten a huge promotion that she has worked for all her career.  She has a rich white boyfriend, one of the landed gentry.

But there's a flip side.  She feels the racism, mostly covert these days, in every action and conversation.  She is the one chosen to make the school presentations, the face of diversity.  She gets the automatic assumption that she has her job and position only because of a need to show evenhandedness in hiring and promotion.  Occasionally, the racism on the street is more overt.  

This weekend, she is to attend a huge garden party for the weekend at her boyfriend's parents' estate, the place he grew up.  But she has also gotten news of a health issue, one that is serious.  Is it worth the fight it will take to defeat it or is she just too tired of fighting?

Natasha Brown knows the life she writes about.  She was the British girl with the great education and she worked in financial services.  This novel won acclaim and it should have.  It was the Foyles Book Of The Year and won a Betty Trask award.  I don't think I've ever read a book that made it clearer the life that POC live, the way that every conversation can be loaded with racist assumptions and how true accomplishments are waved aside as things that had to be done for appearance's sake.  It is a short novel but it hits extremely hard.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.