About

Mr B's couldn't be more thrilled to welcome award-winning novelist Natasha Brown back to Mr B's, to chat to them about her bold and provocative new novel, Universality.

Opening with a man being bludgeoned to death with a gold bar, Universality follows a brave young journalist as she weaves through anarchist movements, amoral bankers and an inflammatory columnist, in search of the truth. Compelling, unflinching and impossibly sharp, Natasha's sophomore novel is destined to be one of the most talked about of 2025.

Natasha was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2023, and her debut novel, Assembly, was a bestseller at Mr B's and a huge team favourite. It was shortlisted for countless awards and went on to win both the Betty Trask Award and Foyles Book of the Year.

About the book:

Remember – words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency.

On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar.

A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting 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. Through a voyeuristic lens, it focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. The follow-up novel to Natasha Brown's Assembly is a compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language. It dares you to look away.

'Universality is 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 breathtaking talent – Natasha Brown is probably my favourite young British novelist.' Elizabeth Day

Original, vital, and unputdownable.' Tess Gunty