Join us when we welcome Natasha Brown to discuss her incredible debut novel, ASSEMBLY, with Sara Collins. The event will be streaming via Instagram Live.

Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Step out into a world of Go Home 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.

The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?

Assembly is a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers. And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life.

Natasha Brown has worked in the financial services for the last ten years and studied Maths at Cambridge University. She developed ASSEMBLY after receiving a 2019 London Writers Award in the literary fiction category and lives in London.

Sara Collins is of Jamaican descent and grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years, before admitting that what she really wanted to do was write novels. She obtained a Master’s degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Cambridge University, where she was the 2015 recipient of the Michael Holroyd Prize. In 2016, she was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish prize for The Confessions of Frannie Langton, her first novel, a gothic romance about the twisted love affair between a Jamaican maid and her French mistress in 19th century London.

Join us when we welcome Sam Riviere to read from and discuss his acclaimed debut novel, DEAD SOULS, with Lucy Mercer. The event will be streaming via Instagram Live.

‘I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank…’

Later that evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese.

In a conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese’s story of his spectacular fall from grace.

A story about a scandal that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial plagiarism.

A story about childhood encounters with nothingness and a friend’s descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the death of an old poet.

A story about a retreat to the East Anglian countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts – plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated…

A story that will take the entire night – and the remainder of the novel – to tell.

Sam Riviere is the author of the poetry books 81 Austerities (2012), Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (2015), and After Fame (2020), all published by Faber & Faber, as well as numerous limited-edition titles. Born in Norwich, he currently lives in Edinburgh, where he runs the micropublisher If a Leaf Falls Press. DEAD SOULS is his first novel, and is published by W&N in the U.K. and Catapult in the U.S.A.

Lucy Mercer‘s debut poetry collection, EMBLEM, is forthcoming from Prototype in 2022. She lives in London.