Title : Universality
Author: Natasha Brown
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 978-0593977309
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 176
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

Natasha Brown’s second novel, Universality, is a sharp, satirical ride through modern media, privilege, and power. It opens with what seems like a feature from a glossy magazine: a COVID-era rave at a Yorkshire farmhouse ends with one of its members and the owner’s son bludgeoning a communal leader with a gold bar. The opening feels almost sensational, like something out of a tabloid, but as you keep reading you realise Brown isn’t chasing shock value, she’s pulling apart the very idea of storytelling, and showing how messy and self-serving it can be.

At the centre is Hannah, a journalist whose piece takes on a life of its own, dragging her along with it in ways she never intended. We hear from Lenny, a controversial columnist and the father’s lover, whose son committed the attack. We glimpse a disgraced banker, and members of a failing commune. Each section pulls apart the original story, revealing self-interest, image-crafting, and the messy ways people respond to attention and meaning.

There’s a wickedness here, a clarity in how Brown shows language as currency and sometimes as a weapon. Yet, for me, Assembly remains the stronger book. There, Brown used just over a hundred pages to collapse an entire consciousness: a Black British woman grappling with class, race, illness, identity in a prose so stripped back it was devastating. That intimacy and precision hit harder than Universality’s wry expansiveness.

Universality is broader, looser, with more characters and perspectives but that breadth sometimes dulls the edges. Lenny can feel almost too archetypal, the dinner-party scenes teeter toward caricature, and the story breaks out of the quiet pressure cooker of Assembly into a noisy satire.

Still, Brown’s control over tone is dazzling. She slips from magazine feature to interview to think-piece to confessional with remarkable ease. What Universality really underlines is how words can get ahead of truth, how the telling of a story can matter more than what actually happened. It’s sharp and often funny, sometimes frustrating, but always alive to the world we’re living in. If you loved Assembly for its quiet devastation and emotional precision, you might find Universality more stimulating than shattering.