Vivified by a photoshoot on her publisher’s rooftop terrace, with its views of the City of London to the east and a stone’s throw from Fleet Street to the south, Natasha Brown politely asks my permission before changing out of high heels into more comfortable flats. It’s a gesture familiar to both of us from previous lives: like me, she spent a decade commuting to a job in finance before pivoting to writing full-time.
Brown and I meet on a blustery afternoon at The Bindery, the Art Deco building that houses Faber’s swish open-plan offices. We’re tucked in a cosy conference room to discuss Universality, the highly anticipated follow-up to her debut novel Assembly. If Assembly, which unspooled one woman’s interiority as she prepared for a garden party, was likened to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, then Universality, an ensemble novel concerned with social mobility, brings to mind a modern Jane Austen.
A breakout hit among both critics and readers, Assembly won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. It also led to the now-35-year-old Brown being named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists — a prestigious list of 20 writers under 40 working in the UK compiled only once a decade. The list’s increasing diversity reflects a welcome plurality of perspectives in British letters. Part of the inspiration for the title Universality, Brown tells me, is “this question of what we consider universal literature”.
Although her parents met while studying abroad at university in the US, Brown was born and raised in London. As a child, she revelled in the broad range of books in her grandparents’ house, from her grandmother’s nursing manuals and knitting books to a “gorgeous” bound volume of Shakespeare’s plays. A birthday gift from her mother, Pride and Prejudice was her first favourite book. Despite being an avid reader, studying creative writing was never on the table. Instead, Brown read mathematics at Cambridge.
Her studies have nonetheless informed her writing: “Maths really has its own sense of aesthetics, and this idea of very short, very elegant proofs,” she says. It’s an economy that shows in the prose: she wrote Assembly in snatches before her day job, inching the word count up by 100-200 words each day until it had enough shape to submit to the London Writers Award, which promotes writers from under-represented communities.
“There was a big push for me to double the length,” Brown says of her 100-page debut. “But I’d never want to outstay my welcome.” I point out that it’s hardly a risk with Universality, which, despite a bigger cast, weighs in at just over 150 pages. “That’s the test for my books,” she laughs: “Can you read it one-handed, squashed on the Central line?”
Despite its short length, Assembly took on big themes, addressing the racism and sexism faced by its protagonist as she rises through the ranks at an investment bank. By focusing on the heroine’s workplace dynamics more than the marriage proposal from her wealthy, aristocratic boyfriend, it was also a refreshing change from more traditional plots.
In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s “route into the top tier is marriage, and that secures her family going forwards,” Brown says. “What does that story look like today? That story today maybe looks like studying economics or computer science at university, and then going and working for a big firm.” STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) offers opportunities “that can afford you a security that simply didn’t exist 20 years ago.”
She considers this development of the quaternary sector of the economy — “research and technology, a step beyond services” — “akin to the industrial revolution”. Yet “there aren’t that many books that engage with it in the way that [they engaged with the] marriage plot” she says.
Just as Assembly shed light on the changing face of finance, Universality illuminates the evolution of journalism in the internet age. It opens with a pulpy magazine feature by Hannah Nicholson, an ambitious young journalist. The fictional exposé, “A Fool’s Gold”, was inspired by viral phenomena such as Robert Kolker’s 2023 New York Times Magazine piece “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”, Brown explains.
Influenced by the literary theorist Roland Barthes’ concept of the novel as a space to examine mythologies, Universality reproduces Hannah’s article in its entirety, taking up a third of the book, before unpicking the different perspectives of the characters involved. “If you take this huge, omnipotent eye and put it inside a novel,” Brown wondered, “do you suddenly feel the artifice of it?”
With word rates plummeting for freelance journalists, Hannah struggles before getting her big break with the scoop: an anarchist activist has been bludgeoned with a gold bar during an illegal rave on a Yorkshire farm during lockdown. Her investigation connects the dots between Richard, the banker landlord; the perpetrator of the crime; and a controversial yet charismatic columnist, a woman named Lenny. (If the title of Lenny’s book, No Mo’ Woke, seems over-the-top, it’s worth noting that Piers Morgan’s Woke is Dead is due to be published later this year.)
Universality is narrated predominantly in a free indirect style, until Lenny’s first-person account “bursts out” at the end. The point of view shifts between characters as Brown probes “their idea of the truth, how they express what’s happened”.
After the (seeming) facts presented in the journalism, she says, “I really wanted to unravel it from the fiction perspective . . . get into a particular character’s shoes and see how they see the situation . . . how impartial their view is.” As we gain more understanding of the motivations of the various characters, the novel is a nesting doll of satire that leaves readers uncertain where their loyalties lie.
Like Austen, Brown’s use of the close third-person allows the narrator to gently poke fun at the characters. But while her books take on age-old themes of literature such as property and class, she hopes to bridge the gap with a canon not “entirely intended” to be inclusive.
Published in the summer of 2021, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US, Assembly came out when race was at the forefront of public discourse. “Certainly in the environment that I published into, that was such a big conversation and debate that was going on around my book: what’s considered universal literature, what belongs in the English canon, what’s niche literature and should be kind of sidelined.”
Once Assembly had “earned its place”, Brown felt the freedom to “do something more interesting” and “push more boundaries”. She set out to “attack the same questions” around social mobility “but from a really different perspective”. Hannah, from a working-class background, drifts apart from her “vaguely aristocratic” friends once they outgrow her “bohemian brokenness”.
But “earning more doesn’t really bring her into the kind of middle-class society that she aspires to be a part of,” Brown says. “People like to define class clearly in terms of household income, but it’s never been related to household income,” she adds. Lenny, meanwhile, is “wealthy by any definition, but she’s able to perform a working-class identity because these class markers that we judge by have really nothing to do with your actual economic situation.”
Brown hopes that both of her books might prove useful to those who, like her, are “moving into this totally new world, this totally new social sphere, this totally new kind of work”. Given her fast shot to literary stardom, I am surprised to hear that she is “not too invested in necessarily writing another book” and is keeping her options open for a return to finance — what she calls “normal life and normal work”. (To that end, she is notably circumspect about sharing the specifics of this part of her life.) Not seeing writing as a forever job “takes all the pressure off”, she says. “For me that keeps it fun and that keeps it free.”
As we wrap up our chat, Brown bundles up and zips off at a brisk pace, still wearing her flats. I can’t tell which direction she’s headed, but it’s with a confident stride.
‘Universality’ will be published by Faber on March 13
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