Author Natasha Brown's New Book 'Universality' Is An Instant Classic
Everything Natasha Brown writes starts with a spreadsheet. It’s how her debut novel Assembly came to fruition. After mapping out the narrative themes she wanted to interrogate in an Excel, she started writing before and after work, using her weekends to self-edit. Within six months, Assembly was born and suddenly Brown was the toast of the literary world.
Her predilection for formulae ought to come as no surprise to acolytes of Brown’s journey to literary stardom. After studying mathematics at the University of Cambridge, Brown spent a decade working in financial services before exploring the idea of writing her own book after being inspired by Claudia Ranke’s Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Roland Barthes’s essay, Myth Today.
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Following a fastidiously academic childhood — Brown admits she can’t cook because her focus as an adolescent was on academic success — she always saw herself pivoting her career at the age of 30. And pivot she did. After Assembly’s publication, she left her job in the city in order to write full-time. It proved worth it; in the months following its release, it won the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year, the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Fiction, among many others.
‘I didn’t even have Instagram before Assembly,’ she tells ELLE UK in a dimly lit cafe off the sprawl of Covent Garden. In her first media interview mid-pandemic, the journalist asked ‘who’ she was wearing. She didn’t know what to respond. ‘The culture shock of this new world I was suddenly a part of was interesting to me.’
The pressure that stalked her second novel was almost inevitable. ‘I didn’t want to write a second novel just for the sake of it,’ she explains. ‘My first novel felt really restrictive in a lot of ways, like I was working within these very tight constraints and trying to do something interesting within that. I thought, “I don't want to do that this time.” I want a blank page. So I asked myself, "I could write anything, what would it be?"’
Naturally, that blank page turned into a spreadsheet and in the autumn of 2021, it began to take the form of Universality, Brown’s second novel. ‘It's a comedy thriller about a guy who gets attacked with a solid gold bar,’ she jokes. But, in true Brown style, the book, written with her characteristic elasticity, says so much more. Written from the perspective of each character, Universality traverses class, wealth and power. It tells the story of a young journalist who sets out to uncover a murder mystery and winds up drawing connections between an unsympathetic banker landlord, a larger-than-life columnist, and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but what she uncovers unearths a deeper web of questions.
‘I’d been reading a lot about new journalism, and how Tom Wolfe and his contemporaries started taking from novelistic techniques and bringing those into journalism, and the strange effect that had, particularly amplified by the internet, and this feedback loop we have in metrics and how journalism and entertainment is a really blurred line,’ she explains, adding that she worked on Universality for two and a half years. ‘And I thought that was really interesting. I thought "What if I took a piece in journalistic style inside a novel, could it fit?"'
In recent months, Brown has swapped east London for south-east London and is ready to restore her creativity to factory settings. ‘I think it's sort of nice to take a step back. And also, just to hear from people about what works in this book. Like, what do they find interesting? It's also nice just to give myself a bit of space to, once again, just say, "okay, no limitations. What kind of crazy story do I want to write?" You kind of just have to let the creative process happen. For me, it’s really important to live and to do things that aren't writing.’
Alongside inhaling Golden Age murder mysteries in her spare time, Brown has also started 3D printing: 'I’m not saying it'll be that forever. I just think to have the sort of the freedom to say “I want to learn this, or I want to try that” is a lot of fun.' Whatever she decides to pursue next, one thing’s for sure: wherever Brown goes, success — and a spreadsheet — are sure to follow suit.
Universality, published by Faber, is out March 4, 2025.
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