One by one she takes on hoary old myths, explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past... Lots of people will enjoy this clever and thought-provoking account

A forceful, well-written book, in which Mac Sweeney shows her command of a vast sweep of history

A bold, sweeping bird's-eye view of thousands of years of history that provides a truly global perspective of the past. A fantastic achievement

Bright, expansive, and iconoclastic, this deliciously witty book has the potential to upset the applecart of "Western Civilisation" itself ... A magnificent achievement

Awe-inspiring... Deeply researched, wonderfully well written and immensely thought-provoking, this is an important book which reshapes our understanding of the past

A bracing addition to the ongoing deconstruction of the historiographical pillars of western cultural supremacy

A book to savour ... challenges us to rethink what it means to be of the West. The writing is as accessible as the argument is pointed

Sets the record straight on the modern myth of Western Civilisation. Authoritative and impassioned, this glorious book takes us beyond prejudice and preconception to a new story about the world in which we live

Incredibly successful and impressive... An honest, painstaking and thrilling story that upends almost everything we think we know about the world... I cannot recommend this book more

Fluent and accessible... Mac Sweeney skillfully blends analysis, erudition and anecdote

Fascinating... Mac Sweeney's breadth of knowledge and elegant style keep the book highly engaging

A highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history

A magisterial account of the role of history in the making of the British Empire. At a moment of chronic hand-wringing over the decline of the historical profession and the crisis of the humanities, Time's Monster is an especially welcome addition for understanding how history can be used and misused.

History writing once burnished the monument of imperial progress, and continues to do so for many audiences today. In her brilliant and coruscating account of the uses of history in the making and unmaking of the British empire, Priya Satia offers a striking new way of confronting the problems that continue to plague contemporary societies. This is a bravura performance

As people around the globe struggle against a world order that owes its existence to rampant resource exploitation and dehumanizing beliefs about racial hierarchies, Priya Satia has given us a timely and powerful reminder about the complicity of history, as a discipline, in the making of that order.

A book of big and bold ideas... Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate

Lively. . . [Bakewell's] new book is filled with her characteristic wit and clarity; she manages to wrangle seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative, resisting the traps of windy abstraction and glib oversimplification. . . She puts her entire self into this book, linking philosophical reflections with vibrant anecdotes. She delights in the paradoxical and the particular, reminding us that every human being contains multitudes

A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading. . . Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate

Bakewell brings her signature blend of wit and philosophical sophistication to the complex, sometimes contentious 700-year history of humanist thought . . . Bakewell is no stranger to the art of applying sophisticated philosophical thinking to the urgent business of daily life . . . for her, the essence of humanism lies not in grand ideas but the idiosyncrasies of individual experience

A spine-tingling, seamless account of 700 years of humanist thought

Searing... A rousing, inspired voice demanding to be recognized and heard

Deft, essential, and a novel of poetic consideration, Assembly holds (the Black-British) identity in its hands, examining it until it becomes both truer and stranger - a question more than an answer. I nodded, I mhmmed, I sighed (and laughed knowingly, bitterly)

Bold and original, with a cool intelligence, and so very truthful about the colonialist structure of British society: how it has poisoned even our language, making its necessary dismantling almost the stuff of dreams. I take hope from Assembly, not just for our literature but also for our slow awakening

Mind-bending and utterly original. It's like Thomas Bernhard in the key of Rachel Cusk but about black subjectivity

Brilliantly sharp and curiously Alice-like... It centres on a gifted and driven young Black woman navigating a topsy-turvy and increasingly maddening modern Britain... Her indictment is forensic, clear, elegant, a prose-polished looking glass held up to her not-so-post-colonial nation. Only one puzzle remains unsolved: how a novel so slight can bear such weight

A piercing, cautionary tale about the costs of assimilating into a society still in denial about its colonial past. Brown writes with the deftness and insight of a poet

Bold, elegant, and all the more powerful for its brevity, Assembly captures the sickening weightlessness which a Black British woman, who has been obedient to and complicit with the capitalist system, experiences as she makes life-changing decisions under the pressure of the hegemony

This is a stunning achievement of compressed narrative and fearless articulation

One of the most talked-about debuts of the year . . . you'll read it in one sitting

Thrilling... Brown gets straight to the point. With delivery as crisp and biting into an apple, she short-circuits expectation... This is [the narrator's] story, and she will tell it how she wishes, unpicking convention and form. Like The Drivers' Seat by Muriel Spark, it's thrilling to see a protagonist opting out and going her own way

A nuanced, form-redefining exploration on class, work, gender and race

Across 100 lean pages, Brown deftly handles a gigantic literary heritage... Her style rivals the best contemporary modernists, like Eimear McBride and Rachel Cusk; innocuous or obscure on a first reading, punching on a second... Assembly is only the start

There's something of Isherwood in Brown's spare, illuminating prose... A series of jagged-edged shards that when accumulated form an unhappy mirror in which modern Britain might examine itself

A debut novel as slender and deadly as an adder

A razor-sharp debut... This powerful short novel suggests meaningful discussion of race is all but impossible if imperialism's historical violence remains taboo

Bold, spare, agonisingly well-observed. An impressive debut

Excoriating, unstoppable... The simplicity of the narrative allows complexity in the form: over barely a hundred pages, broken into prose fragments that have been assembled with both care and mercilessness

Beguiling and beautifully written, this is the work of an author with a bright future

Coruscating originality, emotional potency, astonishing artistic vim... This signals the arrival of a truly breathtaking literary voice... A scintillating tour de force

Fierce and accomplished, Assembly interrogates the high cost of surviving in a system designed to exclude you

I was blown away by Assembly, an astonishing book that forces us to see what's underpinning absolutely everything

Coiled and charged, a small shockwave... Sometimes you come across a short novel of such compressed intensity that you wonder why anyone would bother reading longer narratives... [Assembly] casts a huge shadow

A masterwork . . . it contains centuries of wisdom, aesthetic experimentation and history. Brown handles her debut with a surgeon's control and a musician's sensitivity to sound

An extraordinary book, and a compelling read that had me not only gripped but immediately determined to listen again... Highly recommended

'As utterly, urgently brilliant as everyone has said. A needle driven directly into the sclerotic heart of contemporary Britain. Beautiful proof that you don't need to write a long book, just a good book'

Every line of this electrifying debut novel pulses with canny social critique

Devastatingly eloquent, bold, poignant

An achievement that will leave you wondering just how it's possible that this is only the author's very first work... Brown packs so much commentary and insight inside of every single sentence... Original and startling all at once. After reading Assembly, I cannot wait to see what Natasha Brown does next

[Brown's] work is like that of an excellent photographer - you feel like you are finally seeing the world sharply and without the common filters. That is hypnotising

A brilliantly compressed, existentially daring study of a high-flying Black woman negotiating the British establishment