Latest news with #Universality
Sydney Morning Herald
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A Booker winner, a comedy and Hitler's obsession with Einstein
This week's reviews include a satire on the decline of journalism and the people who struggle to make a living from it (ahem), a new love story from Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman, the chilling wartime story of Albert Einstein's cousin Robert and a rags-to-riches sports memoir. FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Universality Natasha Brown Faber, $29.99 Human folly is perhaps the only universal in Natasha Brown's mordant satire on the decline of journalism and the people who struggle to make a living from it. The complexity of storytelling and its indeterminate, ever-shifting power dynamics are both at play in this unravelling of fact and fiction, which begins with a 'long read' written by the uninspiring Hannah. Her article is an exposé which goes viral and causes catastrophe for its subject. Can Hannah be trusted, though? And is her delinquency worse than opinion columnist Miriam Leonard, aka 'Lenny'? Lenny has sniffed the wind, and her hack-and-slashery becomes more ideologically promiscuous as she changes mastheads. Universality is a courageous, entertaining and deliciously sardonic indictment of the flaws and failings of contemporary media. Brown delights in brutal social satire and in skewering her hideous characters, and the plot unfolds with a twisting relationship to the truth that reads, in the end, like a black comic thriller. Room on the Sea André Aciman Faber, $26.99 From the author of Call Me By Your Name – adapted into the 2017 film starring Timothée Chalamet – comes a different kind of love story. The lovers in this slender novella aren't brimming with youth like Oliver and Elio. They're grey-haired paramours who meet while waiting to be selected for jury duty in New York. Paul is a retired lawyer, Catherine a psychiatrist and both have partners who aren't meeting their needs. They pursue an affair but must decide the dicier question of whether to turn fleeting pleasure into something more lasting. The matter-of-fact narration in Room on the Sea disguises ephemerality. Where the characters in Call Me By Your Name reflect on future selves that they're too passionately in the process of becoming to fully imagine, this romance is suffused by memory and nostalgia and the regret of roads-not-taken. Delight taken in the present is also a theme, and Aciman achieves a depth of affection – to genuinely like someone is in some ways a more profound and elusive thing than to love them – in this crisp, meditative romance. The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains Sarah Clutton Allen & Unwin, $34.99 A precocious almost 10-year-old boy discovers a family he never knew he had in this quirky charmer from Sarah Clutton. Raised by his mum Emilia, Alfie Bains has only ever known Ireland, but when crisis strikes, he learns his mum has lied to him. It seems Alfie has relatives halfway across the world and – thrust into the small town of Beggars Rock in Tasmania – he's determined to find his father. No one seems keen to talk about this family secret – not his grandmother Penny, nor Cynthia (the woman Alfie suspects of being his other grandma), nor Cynthia's son Noah (who isn't Alfie's dad but could know who is). The story shifts between events that led to Alfie's obscure origin story a decade before, and his adventures trying to sleuth out the truth about where he came from. The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains is a warm and poignant and funny mystery of the self, featuring a loveable, whip-smart kid, and a portrait of a close-knit rural community full of dark secrets and memorable characters. Twelve Post-War Tales Graham Swift Scribner $35 This suite of short fiction from Graham Swift is unified by the shadows and ghosts of World War II, though the stories in it are otherwise immensely various. An elderly woman whose memory is failing muses on a moment she has never recalled – the day her mother died in the Blitz when she was only three years old. A British soldier journeys to Germany in the early 1960s and has a sinister encounter with an official as he tries to find out what happened to a lost Jewish relative. A father is determined for his daughter's wedding to not be derailed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a young woman touched by domestic violence meets a black G.I. with affecting consequence. Twelve Post-War Tales is a subtle, empathic collection written with tenderness and gentle humour, offering diverse portraits of ordinary lives touched by the unfeeling hand of history. NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK The Einstein Vendetta Thomas Harding Michael Joseph, $36.99 Just before the liberation of Florence in August 1944, a small unit of German soldiers broke into a villa not far from Florence intending to arrest Robert Einstein (cousin of Albert) who lived there with his family. Sticking to a pre-arranged plan should this happen, Robert hid in the nearby woods, while his non-Jewish wife and two daughters stayed in the villa. The Germans shot them, and Robert heard the shots. Harding, whose family knew the Einsteins, grippingly details events which unfold like a dark thriller. A war crime, it remains a cold case, but this much is clear, the order came from the top. Hitler was obsessed with Albert Einstein and put a price on his head, but Albert was out of reach in the US. And when they couldn't capture Robert, they killed the next best thing – his family. Chilling and sad. Robert took his own life a year later. Saving Dragons Dianne Dempsey Arcadia, $49.95 Russell Goldfield Jack. Not your average middle name, but Russell Jack, who was born into the Bendigo Chinese community in 1935, is not your average person – as this lively, informed biography demonstrates. But it's also a timely case study – running from the gold rush years to the present day – of the Chinese/Australian experience. The White Australia Policy was in place for much of the time, and this is also a record of racism. When Jack married his Catholic-born wife, for instance, there was significant community disapproval of the 'mixed' marriage. But it's also an inspiring tale of adversity and triumph that covers Jack's sporting achievements (he carried the torch in the 1956 Olympics), and, with his wife, his pivotal role in establishing the world-famous Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo. An uplifting tale that roars. Battle of the Banks Bob Crawshaw Australian Scholarly publishing, $49.95 In August 1947, Prime Minister Ben Chifley issued a 42-word press statement saying the government had set in motion plans to nationalise the banking system. The impact was immediate. It was war. Chifley was convinced that to affect a smooth transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime one, control of the banks was essential. Robert Menzies, who immediately saw his chance to return from the political wilderness, hit the communist/socialist fear button (Chifley was a well-known anti-communist). The battle lines were drawn: the government against an opposition aligned with the banks and wealthy, vested private interests. The campaign was heated, intense and, in the case of Jack Lang and Chifley, got quite personal. A scrupulously detailed study of a big picture moment in Australian politics and the forces it unleashed. Legends and Soles Sonny Vaccaro (with Armen Keteyian) Harper Collins, $22.99 Sonny Vaccaro was once described by a major US sports magazine as 'the man responsible for the most points, rebounds, assists and highlight plays in NBA history'. You might be forgiven for thinking he's the greatest player of all time you've never heard of, but, in fact, he's a marketing guru for shoe companies such as Nike, and had a crucial role in launching some of the greatest basketball players of all time – like Michael Jordon. His memoir is essentially an Italian kid's rags-to-riches tale, beginning in steel town Pennsylvania, incorporating stories of his father's bootlegging days, Sonny's time in gambling, and then cracking a marketing job at Nike and becoming well-known enough for a film, Air, to feature him. It's easy enough reading, but I suspect you've really got to be a big basketball fan to get into it.
The Age
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A Booker winner, a comedy and Hitler's obsession with Einstein
This week's reviews include a satire on the decline of journalism and the people who struggle to make a living from it (ahem), a new love story from Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman, the chilling wartime story of Albert Einstein's cousin Robert and a rags-to-riches sports memoir. FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Universality Natasha Brown Faber, $29.99 Human folly is perhaps the only universal in Natasha Brown's mordant satire on the decline of journalism and the people who struggle to make a living from it. The complexity of storytelling and its indeterminate, ever-shifting power dynamics are both at play in this unravelling of fact and fiction, which begins with a 'long read' written by the uninspiring Hannah. Her article is an exposé which goes viral and causes catastrophe for its subject. Can Hannah be trusted, though? And is her delinquency worse than opinion columnist Miriam Leonard, aka 'Lenny'? Lenny has sniffed the wind, and her hack-and-slashery becomes more ideologically promiscuous as she changes mastheads. Universality is a courageous, entertaining and deliciously sardonic indictment of the flaws and failings of contemporary media. Brown delights in brutal social satire and in skewering her hideous characters, and the plot unfolds with a twisting relationship to the truth that reads, in the end, like a black comic thriller. Room on the Sea André Aciman Faber, $26.99 From the author of Call Me By Your Name – adapted into the 2017 film starring Timothée Chalamet – comes a different kind of love story. The lovers in this slender novella aren't brimming with youth like Oliver and Elio. They're grey-haired paramours who meet while waiting to be selected for jury duty in New York. Paul is a retired lawyer, Catherine a psychiatrist and both have partners who aren't meeting their needs. They pursue an affair but must decide the dicier question of whether to turn fleeting pleasure into something more lasting. The matter-of-fact narration in Room on the Sea disguises ephemerality. Where the characters in Call Me By Your Name reflect on future selves that they're too passionately in the process of becoming to fully imagine, this romance is suffused by memory and nostalgia and the regret of roads-not-taken. Delight taken in the present is also a theme, and Aciman achieves a depth of affection – to genuinely like someone is in some ways a more profound and elusive thing than to love them – in this crisp, meditative romance. The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains Sarah Clutton Allen & Unwin, $34.99 A precocious almost 10-year-old boy discovers a family he never knew he had in this quirky charmer from Sarah Clutton. Raised by his mum Emilia, Alfie Bains has only ever known Ireland, but when crisis strikes, he learns his mum has lied to him. It seems Alfie has relatives halfway across the world and – thrust into the small town of Beggars Rock in Tasmania – he's determined to find his father. No one seems keen to talk about this family secret – not his grandmother Penny, nor Cynthia (the woman Alfie suspects of being his other grandma), nor Cynthia's son Noah (who isn't Alfie's dad but could know who is). The story shifts between events that led to Alfie's obscure origin story a decade before, and his adventures trying to sleuth out the truth about where he came from. The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains is a warm and poignant and funny mystery of the self, featuring a loveable, whip-smart kid, and a portrait of a close-knit rural community full of dark secrets and memorable characters. Twelve Post-War Tales Graham Swift Scribner $35 This suite of short fiction from Graham Swift is unified by the shadows and ghosts of World War II, though the stories in it are otherwise immensely various. An elderly woman whose memory is failing muses on a moment she has never recalled – the day her mother died in the Blitz when she was only three years old. A British soldier journeys to Germany in the early 1960s and has a sinister encounter with an official as he tries to find out what happened to a lost Jewish relative. A father is determined for his daughter's wedding to not be derailed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a young woman touched by domestic violence meets a black G.I. with affecting consequence. Twelve Post-War Tales is a subtle, empathic collection written with tenderness and gentle humour, offering diverse portraits of ordinary lives touched by the unfeeling hand of history. NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK The Einstein Vendetta Thomas Harding Michael Joseph, $36.99 Just before the liberation of Florence in August 1944, a small unit of German soldiers broke into a villa not far from Florence intending to arrest Robert Einstein (cousin of Albert) who lived there with his family. Sticking to a pre-arranged plan should this happen, Robert hid in the nearby woods, while his non-Jewish wife and two daughters stayed in the villa. The Germans shot them, and Robert heard the shots. Harding, whose family knew the Einsteins, grippingly details events which unfold like a dark thriller. A war crime, it remains a cold case, but this much is clear, the order came from the top. Hitler was obsessed with Albert Einstein and put a price on his head, but Albert was out of reach in the US. And when they couldn't capture Robert, they killed the next best thing – his family. Chilling and sad. Robert took his own life a year later. Saving Dragons Dianne Dempsey Arcadia, $49.95 Russell Goldfield Jack. Not your average middle name, but Russell Jack, who was born into the Bendigo Chinese community in 1935, is not your average person – as this lively, informed biography demonstrates. But it's also a timely case study – running from the gold rush years to the present day – of the Chinese/Australian experience. The White Australia Policy was in place for much of the time, and this is also a record of racism. When Jack married his Catholic-born wife, for instance, there was significant community disapproval of the 'mixed' marriage. But it's also an inspiring tale of adversity and triumph that covers Jack's sporting achievements (he carried the torch in the 1956 Olympics), and, with his wife, his pivotal role in establishing the world-famous Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo. An uplifting tale that roars. Battle of the Banks Bob Crawshaw Australian Scholarly publishing, $49.95 In August 1947, Prime Minister Ben Chifley issued a 42-word press statement saying the government had set in motion plans to nationalise the banking system. The impact was immediate. It was war. Chifley was convinced that to affect a smooth transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime one, control of the banks was essential. Robert Menzies, who immediately saw his chance to return from the political wilderness, hit the communist/socialist fear button (Chifley was a well-known anti-communist). The battle lines were drawn: the government against an opposition aligned with the banks and wealthy, vested private interests. The campaign was heated, intense and, in the case of Jack Lang and Chifley, got quite personal. A scrupulously detailed study of a big picture moment in Australian politics and the forces it unleashed. Legends and Soles Sonny Vaccaro (with Armen Keteyian) Harper Collins, $22.99 Sonny Vaccaro was once described by a major US sports magazine as 'the man responsible for the most points, rebounds, assists and highlight plays in NBA history'. You might be forgiven for thinking he's the greatest player of all time you've never heard of, but, in fact, he's a marketing guru for shoe companies such as Nike, and had a crucial role in launching some of the greatest basketball players of all time – like Michael Jordon. His memoir is essentially an Italian kid's rags-to-riches tale, beginning in steel town Pennsylvania, incorporating stories of his father's bootlegging days, Sonny's time in gambling, and then cracking a marketing job at Nike and becoming well-known enough for a film, Air, to feature him. It's easy enough reading, but I suspect you've really got to be a big basketball fan to get into it.
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Universality by Natasha Brown review – a fabulous fable about the politics of storytelling
Miriam Leonard, AKA Lenny, one of a tight core of characters at the heart of Natasha Brown's terrific second novel, would probably dislike Universality intensely. Then again, she might love it, because an unpredictability of opinion is her stock in trade: a newspaper columnist who has recently sashayed from the comment pages of the Telegraph to those of the Observer, her views on class, race, sex, the economy and, latterly, the iniquity of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes are uncompromisingly held and vociferously broadcast, but only opaquely coherent. To keep moving is the trick. Lenny is making a better fist of survival than many of those around her, with her exceptionally neat formula for wooing readers, which involves alighting on a news story and making 'a lofty comparison': 'Obscure elements of European history are best, but a Russian novel or philosophical theory can be just as effective.' Certainly, she is faring better than disgraced banker Richard, cast out of his shiny-paned City office and his home in the Surrey stockbroker belt after a long read in which he has enthusiastically and, it turns out, foolhardily participated goes viral; the piece's author, struggling freelance journalist Hannah, is briefly propelled to something approaching professional and personal respectability but finds herself similarly becalmed once the click-frenzy moves on. And neither of them would want to swap places with Jake, Lenny's desperate and ne'er-do-well son ('a mass of wild hair, shambolic clothing and lifelong unaccountability', she thinks grimly as she once again pushes him away), or with Pegasus, the aspiring communard whose utopian dream has irretrievably fractured. Hannah's piece, A Fool's Gold, forms the first section of Universality, its tone, vocabulary and contours immediately familiar to anyone who's read a newspaper or magazine in the last decade or so. An apparently outlandish story – in this case, a lockdown rave at a farmhouse that ends with someone stoving in another's head with a gold bar – mutates into an exercise in journalistic detection and deduction that showcases the writer's ingenuity while also allowing them to suggest broader sociopolitical themes. A touch of personal involvement is a given: 'Nothing at the supermarket can beat the warm, frothy taste of unpasteurised cow's milk, ladled fresh from the milker's bucket', writes Hannah of her bucolic upbringing adjacent to the now-desolate farm; it's not much of a spoiler to reveal that her memories are entirely invented. But A Fool's Gold takes more significant liberties with the facts, and the extent to which that matters is teased out over the course of the novel's subsequent sections, in which we encounter a broken Richard, weeping on his suburban doorstep, meet Hannah's friends at a truly appalling dinner party in Edmonton and follow Lenny to a literary festival in which self-regard oozes from the marquee's pristine flaps. Brown is a talented satirist, for sure, and her commitment to contemporary detail is impressive, whether she's sketching the self-congratulatory informality of shepherd's pie and dusty Malbec bottles in a middle-class kitchen or the shuttered high-streets of London's less fashionable margins. Among these settings, the zeitgeist's big topics abound: the obsolescence of political tribalism, the superficiality of a turbulent media landscape, the rebranding of once-vilified theories of genetic inheritance in the name of science. As Hannah unconfidently roasts a chicken for her horrible friends (an Alison Roman recipe, the book's notes tell us, in itself funny given Roman's much-shared recipes), John breezily talks about 'meatspace alignment' while basking in his own intellectual superiority: 'Of course reactionary outrage was preferable to admitting ignorance. He was glad he'd found other, better, sources of information. The books, blogs and podcasts that would follow the science wherever it led, even if – fuck it, especially if – the end result wasn't woke. A fear of facts was holding the country back. He looked into Hannah's dull, unthinking face; the inadvertent herald of western society's decline, stupidly chewing an olive.' Brown's debut, Assembly, was equally compact and similarly capacious, and it earned her a place on Granta's list of the best young British novelists in 2023. Here, she zooms out from Assembly's tenser focus to present us not merely with a portrait of a society painfully and unproductively turned in on itself but with an incisive exploration of the power dynamics of storytelling, in which it's never entirely clear who has the upper hand, nor indeed why they want it. As a reader, you probably wouldn't trust any of them. Universality by Natasha Brown is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Universality by Natasha Brown review – clever satire of identity politics
Should your social media occasionally present you with publishing-related content, you may have spotted proofs for Natasha Brown's Universality on your feed last autumn. The excitement with which various 'bookfluencers' clutched them was twofold. Brown appeared on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list in 2023, and Universality is the follow-up to her 2021 debut, Assembly, which saw her shortlisted for a Goldsmiths, Orwell, and Folio prize: its critical and commercial popularity has undoubtedly created a sense of anticipation for this next book. But alongside that fact was the feeling that the proof itself provoked as an aesthetic object: striking and slender, with its reflective gold jacket and spectrally engraved lettering. 'Oh, it's a book,' a family member of mine exclaimed on holding it, having been intrigued by what I was carrying around. It wasn't an absurd response. Those early copies were fashioned to look like bars of gold, in reference to the fact that the first 49 pages are delivered in the style of a magazine feature about a young man who uses one to bludgeon the leader of a group called The Universalists, a faction of political activists (or squatters, depending on who you ask) attempting to form a self-sustaining 'microsociety' on a Yorkshire farm during the Covid-19 pandemic. It's the sort of story that would set social media alight for days, or rather, as Brown wryly notes in the book's second chapter, two weeks: 'a modern parable [that exposes] the fraying fabric of British society'. Each detail is more eye-popping than the last. Both the farm and the gold belong to a banker named Richard Spencer, a man with 'multiple homes, farming land, investments and cars […] a household staff; a pretty wife, plus a much younger girlfriend'. A perfect symbol, in short, of 'the excessive fruits of late capitalism'. Jake, the young man doing the bludgeoning, is the son of a reactionary British journalist, Miriam 'Lenny' Leonard, whose columns are designed less to provoke thought and more to go viral online. The Universalists themselves share DNA with Extinction Rebellion, and do just as good a job at polarising the great British public. At the centre of it all is that gold ingot, with which, post-bludgeoning, Jake absconds after police raid the farm. Hence the flashy proofs. Except – not really. Engraved on the back of each copy is a quote from the penultimate chapter: 'Words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency.' After the first section the conceit of a magazine feature drops, with succeeding chapters told from different characters' perspectives. We learn to read carefully. It's worth, in this case, not spoiling the remainder of the plot. Brown worked in financial services for a decade, and her novels so far inherit as themes the mediums through which she has earned her living: the circulation of money, and language – both their own salient forms of capital. Nevertheless, Brown knows that her readers' biases are the most satisfying currency she can trade on and so creates, in a mere 156 pages, an impressive matryoshka doll of a story, where each established fact is progressively re-rendered with increasing detail and nuance. Assembly was a similarly slim novel about a Black female banker recently diagnosed with cancer who prepares to attend a party at her boyfriend's parents' country estate. It drew comparisons to Mrs Dalloway, but should rightfully have been read against French philosopher and linguist Roland Barthes: Brown's self-professed aim when she began writing was to assess whether 'language can be neutral' in the context of 21st-century identity politics. Despite a lucrative job and a dynamic mind, as an ill Black woman the narrator of Assembly functioned as a discrete semiotic system on to which other characters (and, regrettably, various readers) projected, to quote Barthes, 'the weight of a gaze conveying an intention that [ceased to be] linguistic'. Various well-meaning remarks uttered by other characters betrayed a series of flawed insights regarding the narrator's status, potential, health, emotional wellbeing and desires. 'I grew up dirt poor, you know […] So I get it. I get the grind. All this – it's as foreign to me as it is to you,' a work colleague tells the narrator, despite having no discernible knowledge of her upbringing or previous work history. That such utterances were rejected by the narrator herself went somewhat ironically unnoticed by most of the people who interviewed Brown during her publicity run for the book. 'Why subject myself further to their reductive gaze?' read one passage. 'To this crushing objecthood. Why endure my own dehumanisation?' Why not, in other words, try to be free? This time Brown is having more fun within the constraints of our current sociopolitical discourse. Universality is less measured than its predecessor, and trades on the inverse of its core question: nothing about the language in it is neutral. Pronouncements on 'wokeism', on meritocracy, on race and culture wars fall from characters' mouths like bombs. Thanks to the novel's ingenious structure, the more you hear them, the more you realise how inhibiting they are, and how soul-crushingly tiring it is to spend your one precious life negotiating their deployment in a rigged and utterly useless system: a realisation only one character profits from, though dangerously so. It'll be interesting to watch Brown navigate her publicity run in an era of tech bros heralding a very particular mode of free speech. If Assembly was a meditation on the linguistic construction of cultural myths that dominate our present-day understanding of identity, then the final two chapters of Universality successfully consolidate this new novel as an observational satire about the language games that enable that process. To this end, Brown is one of our most intelligent voices writing today, able to block out the short-term chatter around both identity and language in order to excavate much more uncomfortable truths. And despite how genuinely satisfying it is to watch her deconstruct the world as we know it now, Universality arouses in me an excitement over what could happen should she ever choose to stray from social realism. What should we be doing with language? How might things look otherwise? Universality by Natasha Brown is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Independent
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Natasha Brown on her razor-sharp satire Universality: ‘There was absolutely a lot of cringe'
Midway through Universality, Natasha Brown inducts us into the dinner party from hell. Freelance journalist Hannah has invited three old university friends to her new flat, and it's clear they've only turned up because one of her articles has recently gone viral. Just about every conversational taboo – money, religion, politics – is broached in spectacularly awkward fashion. Eventually, the faux politeness threatens to devolve into an all-out ideological slanging match. This portrayal of how friendships can decay in adulthood, fuelled by mutual resentments about privilege and status, is so acutely observed it's excruciating. 'There was absolutely a lot of cringe,' Brown laughs as she remembers writing this scene from her second novel. She's speaking from her home in London, the Zoom frame lined with rows of crowded bookshelves, and what feels like the year's first hint of sun trickling in through the window. The author, 35, has a sharp, unrelenting eye for the tangled dynamics that simmer underneath the surface of social interactions. Her debut novel Assembly, released in 2021 just as Britain was blearily emerging from back-to-back lockdowns, showed off that scalpel-like precision. In it, an unnamed narrator, a Black British woman who has made a 'metric s*** ton' of money in finance, attends a garden party hosted at the country house owned by her white boyfriend's (ancestrally) wealthy parents. Myths about class, race, meritocracy, and belonging are set up only to be shattered. At the time, Brown said she wanted to explore what a story about someone who 'has it all' and still feels dissatisfied might look like from the perspective of a person of colour. Praise came thick and fast; so too did comparisons to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. British Vogue hailed Assembly as 'the debut novel of the summer', and the book went on to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize. Two years later, in 2023, Brown was named on literary magazine Granta 's prestigious Best of Young British Novelists list. Brown, who grew up in London and studied maths at the University of Cambridge, wrote Assembly in snatches of time she could claim between her nine-to-five job working in financial services. 'With the first book, it was really my gym and socialising time that disappeared,' she recalls. Universality was written in an equally piecemeal manner but under very different circumstances, with Brown smack bang in the middle of the promotional circus for Assembly, which took her to Europe and Australia. 'This book was really snatched, [written] in little snatched minutes in the hotel, on trains,' she says. 'I remember once I really offended some writers I was travelling on the train with in France because they were like, 'Come on, have a drink' and I said, 'I need to make my word count!'' In conversation, Brown is softly spoken and quick to laugh, but her drive and focus are palpable. Her considered replies are laser-focused on the craft of writing and teem with literary references from Roland Barthes to Tom Wolfe to the journalist Janet Malcolm. She doesn't own a TV, she admits, in order to avoid distraction. The backdrop may have been different, but her mission statement for book number two is similar. In Assembly, Brown says she tried to 'explore the question of neutrality and language' – to get to grips with how words may seem impartial and unbiased, though are often anything but. When the narrator travels to schools to speak to youngsters about her high-flying career, is she inspiring them or is she parroting empty truisms about meritocracy that only perpetuate the status quo? 'How many women and girls has she lied to?' she asks herself. With Universality, she wanted to look at similar ideas about language, but this time 'from a totally different angle – to step back and explore people who are really powerful when it comes to language and really know how to use words for maximum effect'. To do that, Brown turned her attention to that very 21st-century phenomenon: the viral long read. You know the kind – the sort of stranger-than-fiction article that captivates certain corners of the internet for a couple of weeks, prompting social media debates, spin-off think pieces and, if the writer is lucky, talk of a lucrative streaming adaptation. Brown wanted to 'play around with the contrast between fact and fiction, entertainment and real life', to explore the uneasy contradictions between 'the ultimate omniscient narrator' of a journalistic piece and 'the novel's mainstay, the unreliable narrator'. So, Universality begins with a magazine article, written by Hannah the freelancer, which sets up an irresistible whodunit mystery: a gold bar is used as a weapon in a vicious attack on a Yorkshire farmer, then stolen. The missing ingot is a 'connecting node', drawing together an anarchist group, a wealthy banker, and an outspoken columnist with elastic beliefs. Hannah attempts to uncover the identity of the attacker, a quest that takes her through post-lockdown Britain; at the same time, she attempts to make a state-of-the-nation diagnosis. But are her conclusions too simple, too easily palatable for the magazine's readers? Brown made diagrams and spreadsheets to plot out the central mystery – Assembly also started life in Excel – perhaps a hangover from her previous life in finance – but as the riddle is just about tied up, more pressing, troubling questions seem to arise. For Brown, the gold bar 'really is a MacGuffin', an object that pushes the plot along; the real mystery of the book is how and why this article came to be written in the first place. Can we take its depictions of certain, admittedly unlikeable, characters at face value? Why might we be drawn to side against them? If that all sounds a bit head-scratching, you're not wrong: Universality is the sort of book that forces you to question yourself. One such unlikeable character who is central to those mysteries – and to Brown's mission of exploring how words can influence, wound and distort – is Lenny, a larger-than-life journalist who has built a lucrative public career on being 'one of the few souls brave enough to say the unsayable'. She is part of that particular sub-section of the media whose members pride themselves in putting forward 'common sense' views and gripe about being cancelled in national newspaper columns. She's also a fascinating, elusive creation, dissolving and reforming as soon as you try to pin her down. When I wrote 'Assembly', and now again with this one, it wasn't guaranteed for me that I'd write another book 'I wanted her to be this person who's mean and brash, but also very smart and pretty funny,' Brown explains. 'Who says some things that we might find appalling but can make us laugh while she says them.' Lenny, she adds, 'sees a real separation between what she says and what she believes and doesn't really have any conflict in letting there be a distance between those two'. Brown won't be drawn on whether she drew inspiration for Lenny from any real-life names (are there shades of Katie Hopkins? Or a female Laurence Fox?) 'I really wanted her to be her own thing,' she says, noting that she decided to make the character 'half a generation younger than the big Nineties women journalists who still have an impact today – how would someone who grew up seeing those women, and felt she didn't have the same opportunities, see the world?' It's hard to gauge whether Lenny's heart is in the columns she writes and the soundbites she spews out on her book tours, or whether they are just convenient ways to elevate her profile. As Universality goes on, she becomes particularly fixated on the idea that minority workers are 'disproportionately' represented in the upper echelons of the 'fastest growing sectors of our economy' such as finance and tech. Reading her outbursts, it's hard not to think of the real-life backlash against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies that has kicked off with the second Trump presidency. Arguments like Lenny's are 'just noise', Brown says. 'If you're capable of [those jobs], you can do them.' 'I think the reason why I don't see my life as being forever in writing, why I think I'll go back to Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] and why I really spend a lot of my time encouraging young people to pursue it, is it makes this a non-issue,' she adds, in reference to the debate about DEI policies. 'You get a qualification, and you can demonstrate clearly whether or not you're capable of doing a job, and the results speak for themselves. There's no subjectivity in assessing the output. And I think that's really powerful.' It's surprising to hear that a writer as talented as Brown doesn't necessarily picture a future in writing. But for her, it's liberating. 'When I wrote Assembly, and now again with this one, it wasn't guaranteed for me that I'd write another book,' she says. 'I think not feeling that pressure that I'm going to write another really lets me enjoy and stay in the moment of this book.'
