About Natasha Brown

Natasha Brown is a British novelist.

Her debut novel Assembly was shortlisted for several awards including the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction. It has been translated into 17 languages.

Natasha was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023 and one of the Observer’s Best Debut Novelists in 2021. She’s also a Women’s Prize Futures Award finalist.

About Universality

‘Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling.’ Andrew O’Hagan

‘Original, vital, and unputdownable.’ Tess Gunty

‘Breathtaking… a precise dissection of class, wealth and power.’ Elizabeth Day

In the new novel from the author of Assembly, a viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers. Remember – words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency.

On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but her viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers.

Universality is a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power. Through a voyeuristic lens, it focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. The follow-up novel to Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language.

It dares you to look away.

About Nikesh Shukla

Nikesh Shukla is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter.

Nikesh wrote the 2023 Spider-Man India miniseries ‘Seva’ for Marvel, as well as numerous television projects. He won multiple awards for writing the short film Two Dosas starring Himesh Patel and has worked in multiple writer’s rooms including on projects for Apple TV, Amazon Prime, HBO and Sky. In 2024, he was a Sundance Institute Fellow on their prestigious screenwriting lab.

Nikesh recently released the first book in his kids’ series, The Council Of Good Friends. He is also the author of three YA novels, Run, Riot (shortlisted for a National Book Award), The Boxer (longlisted for the Carnegie Medal) and Stand Up. He is the author of Coconut Unlimited (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award), Meatspace and the critically acclaimed The One Who Wrote Destiny. Nikesh’s new book, Brown Baby: A Memoir Of Race, Family And Home was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. He has also written a book on writing called Your Story Matters.

Nikesh is the co-founder of The Good Literary Agency. He was one of Time Magazine’s cultural leaders, Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Global Thinkers and The Bookseller’s 100 most influential people in publishing in 2016 and in 2017. Nikesh is the editor of the bestselling essay collection, The Good Immigrant, which won the reader’s choice at the Books Are My Bag Awards. He co-edited The Good Immigrant USA with Chimene Suleyman. He also teaches through Faber Academy.

Natasha Brown: Universality