Slyly investigating language and bias in media culture, this follow-up to Assembly confirms Brown as one of the most intelligent voices writing todayShould 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 “mult