Autumn 2025: Universality by Natasha Brown

You have probably seen Natasha Brown’s Universality all over your social media feed. Its inclusion on the Booker Prize’s longlist has, without a doubt, reinforced its position as a must-read book, but it had already been well-regarded by literary critics and readers alike since its publication.  

The book starts with a lengthy magazine article where the “main character” is a gold bar. Through this magazine article, we learn how the gold bar became the unlikely weapon in a bludgeoning that took place during a rave on a West Yorkshire farm, and we meet the eccentric cast of characters entangled in the crime. The piece feels very reminiscent of the sensationalist tone and content of today’s media, but Brown has, very cleverly, woven a deeper layer of social analysis without it feeling out of place. Many times, I found myself snorting when reading phrases that served the double purpose of clearly representing that character’s beliefs, while mocking them at the same time.   When talking about the Universalists,  a group of idealistic activists whose vision of equality mostly benefits people like themselves, she makes it clear that they are “a noticeably homogeneous group: young, middle class and white” and that they have a cushy life to fall back to in case they get tired of the “jaded activist cliché”. 

While it would be easy to drive the reader away from how odious some of these characters are, like Richard and his snootiness or Pegasus, the leader of the Universalists. with his sense of self-importance, the text subtly makes you identify with them. As Brown said during her panel at the International Literature Festival Utrecht’s Exploring Stories event, she was “really interested in people who are excellent communicators, people who can speak to a room, who can whip people up, who can bring them into a story and create realities.” When she spoke about writing Lenny, a columnist who ends up playing a much bigger role that it seems at first glance, she explained that she wanted to see if she could make “a character like that, who feels real,” and even “make her likeable,” someone who “says these things that are kind of appalling but she says it in a way that makes us laugh.” Brown concluded that her goal was to “bring the reader inside of her so they can feel the thrill of the performance, the excitement, the power.” That tension between disgust and fascination is exactly what makes Universality so gripping, we know we shouldn’t like these characters, yet we can’tquite look away. 

Interestingly, Brown herself has said she never set out to write a satire, even though Universality has largely been received that way. She explained at Exploring Stories that she “considered her first novel a satire” because she believes there needs to be humor and exaggeration for something to be categorized like that. But Assembly was regarded as a very sincere story, so instead, she approached Universality with sincerity, and it got the opposite reaction. The fact that so many readers and critics immediately labeled it “satire” says as much about us as it does about the novel. We’re so used to reading our culture through irony that we grab that label as a shortcut and Brown seems happy to let the book occupy that slippery space. 

Throughout the novel, Brown has fun with the conventions of narrative. The way she opens with Hannah’s long-read article is sly; it feels like something you’d click on at 2 a.m. when you’re doom-scrolling, but it also sets up the idea that every narrative is already someone’s version of the truth. Despite the article being flashy and performative, Brown doesn’t let you settle into the show. Instead, you’re nudged to wonder: who’s shaping the spectacle, and to what end? 

Then there’s a dinner party that forms the middle of the book. It’s the kind of gathering where everyone tries to show they’re woke, ironic, edgy, but end up dismantling themselves with badly timed takes and class resentment. In an interview with Independent, Brown admits “there was absolutely a lot of cringe” when she wrote the dinner scene. That cringe is the point. It exposes how brittle and performative our discourse becomes when we’re trying to signal virtue rather than actually listen or change. 

A running thread through the novel is Brown’s obsession with language as currency, influenced by her financial background. Words aren’t neutral; they’re used as power plays. As the Booker Prize judges note, the book “reveals the contradictions of a society shaped by entrenched systems of economic, political, and media control”. Hannah’s article is not just a story, it becomes symbolic capital, it brings her momentary status, but also isolation and critique from her own social circle. 

And let’s not ignore class. Brown is sharpening her lens here: she zooms out from racial identity politics (which she handled in Assembly) to interrogate how capitalist structures and inherited privilege shape who gets heard, who gets to survive, and who gets erased. Richard’s multiple properties and investments become more than decorations; they’re symbols of a world that’s tilted before you even walk in. The Universalists, the communal experiment on the farm, feels poetic but also doomed, crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cynthia Matute is a Peruvian MA student in Literature Today at Utrecht University. She’s interested in how social media and online spaces are reshaping what we read and how we talk about books. She’s also an avid collector of stationery and, more recently, tote bags.