The publication of Assembly in 2021 marked Natasha Brown out as a virtuosic writer. Her debut – a cleanly written 112 pages – told the story of a black British woman as she prepares for a party at her white boyfriend’s family estate. With remarkable precision, Brown dissected the disorienting experience of assimilating across lines of class and race. For it, she won numerous award shortlistings, including for the Goldsmiths and Orwell prizes.
Brown’s second novel treads familiar, hyper-contemporary ground. In Universality, she examines how identity politics is cynically co-opted, especially by the media classes. But while Assembly brought to mind the vivid interiority of Virginia Woolf, Universality is a satire recalling Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood eco-warriors, Bella Mackie’s ridicule of the rich and the derision of the media found in Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings.
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