Universality

I think Universality is the book everyone will be reading and talking about in 2025. It provides a brilliant, unusual social x-ray of modern Britain, stylishly exposing our moral ecosystem. Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling, this is the kind of fiction that makes you sit up and feel alive.

Universality is smart and expansive, keen on the intricacies of language and class.

I was riveted ... piercingly sly and inspiring in its economy -- and, perhaps most importantly, tons of fun. You could call it crime or you could call it literary fiction, but either way it outpaces its contemporaries in both genres with ease.

In what is proving to be her signature architecture—a compact, cunning design of secret passageways—Brown immerses the reader in a house of haunted language. Fixing its attention on the cultural mutations of the extraction economy, Universality implicates everyone and condemns no one. Here, Brown accomplishes the seemingly impossible: she examines a cultural illness without imposing a prescription, she centers nuance without sacrificing clarity, she creates a satire in which everyone remains fully dimensional, she offers an indictment as comical as it is chilling, and she delivers unflinching social analysis that reads like a thriller. In some of the most intentional and astute prose I’ve encountered, Brown becomes a detective of careless, weaponized rhetoric. I emerged from this novel with the conviction that the murder victim Brown is here to avenge is discourse itself. Original, vital, and unputdownable.

Terse, elegant and prompt, Universality holds up a mirror to Britain by examining, through slapstick violence and media parody, the “social fragility” exposed by the financial crash and the pandemic, exploited by tergiversating populists weaponising a deliberate misdefinition of wokeness for “clicks and shares”. Another sharp serve from a brilliant mind.

A breathtaking talent - Natasha Brown is probably my favourite young British novelist. Universality is a precise dissection of class, wealth and power, written with a spareness that elevates and electrifies her prose. It's both intelligent and very entertaining. I didn’t think Brown could better her debut, Assembly, but - improbably - she has. Utterly phenomenal.