Natasha Brown & Olivia Sudjic: Unravelling Lives

How do we manage the carefully assembled pieces of our lives, and what happens when events out of our control leave us exposed? These questions seem to haunt both Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Road, and Natasha Brown’s Assembly. In Sudjic’s intensely atmospheric work, an unexpected proposal forces main character Anya to confront the trauma of her childhood in Sarajevo. In Natasha Brown’s blistering debut Assembly, the novel’s narrator is an unnamed Black British woman who has been navigating class, race, freedom, the myths of meritocracy when everything threatens to come apart. In this event, filmed live at the 2021 Edinburgh International Book Festival, Sudjic and Brown discuss their captivating stories of 21st century life and womanhood.