In Assembly, Brown has crafted an exquisitely sparse, scathing assessment of a Britain still clinging to the threads of Empire, even as the shameless obfuscation of its colonial crimes are finally being dragged into our collective cultural consciousness. It's a bold little book: one I'll be recommending to everyone.

Although at a first glance the splintered narrative reminded me of Offill's Weather, I quickly found that, where Offill draws in the peripheral and lightens heavy themes with dry humour, Brown's writing is direct and completely unforgiving. There's nothing light here.

We witness moments of blatant ignorance, senseless hostility and all-too-familiar microagressions and racism, as Brown's narrator considers the cost of having always to transcend expectations to be seen. In the personal and professional assemblies of her life, she is made an outsider, an other, and her successes are stripped from her before she can even learn the weight of them.

'Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much - for this opportunity. For my life.'

Assembly offers an incisive presentation of historic and contemporary injustice in this country and, right alongside her narrator, Brown asks us to consider our own complicity in the structurally oppressive systems that seem always to mutate and prevail. She holds the idea of something different before us.

I am so impressed by this astoundingly accomplished debut novel. It seems strange to compare it to Azumah Nelson's gorgeous debut, Open Water, but the impact was the same. Simply put: this is a book to be read and read again. A book to open eyes.