![]() What is citizenship when you’ve watched screaming Go Home vans crawl your street?. We’ve seen now, just as then, the readiness of this government and its enterprising Home Secretary to destroy paper, our records and proof. ![]() I am appalled at my relief and at this sort of relief-thin and substantive only as the paper it’s printed on. I open it and find my unsmiling face twice amongst the pages. The small envelope is government-brown in a pile of white. Dalloway is not uncertain in her Britishness, her feelings of belonging, whereas Brown’s narrator does not get this privilege: Woolf writes, “since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate to give her party.” Mrs. Dalloway is at the other end: she is hosting the party that the narrator will attend. In some ways, it seems a response to Woolf. Assembly, like Woolf’s novel, is a book of interiority. ![]() The book is told from a first person narration and is similar to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. ![]() In Natasha Brown’s short novel, Assembly, there is a literal plot-a financially successful woman who has just found out she has cancer must go to her boyfriend’s parents’ anniversary party-and also a metaphoric plot, one that circles around issues of class, social mobility, race and uncertainty, always uncertainty. ![]()
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