'It wasn't guaranteed for me that I'd write another book'

The author Natasha Brown, who shot to prominence with her debut novel 'Assembly', speaks to Katie Rosseinsky about writing habits, language, and her button-pushing new book

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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 allout 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 shit 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