Universality: Natasha Brown in conversation with Preti Taneja

‘The book everyone will be reading and talking about in 2025... Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling, this is the kind of fiction that makes you sit up and feel alive.’ Andrew O’Hagan

‘A razor-sharp satire.’ Guardian

It’s 2020 – lockdown. Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar that is worth over half a million dollars. When a young journalist sets out to uncover the truth about the attack, she connects 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 by one of the UK’s most exciting and insightful writers.

Natasha Brown’s novel Assembly was shortlisted for 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.

Preti Taneja is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University.