From the magazine

Satire and settled scores: Universality by Natasha Brown reviewed

Skewering journalistic pretension to authority is the main business of a novel that contrives to be both viciously accurate and weirdly off the mark

Anthony Cummins
Natasha Brown in Cologne in 2022. Henning Kaiser/dpa/Alamy Live News
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 05 April 2025
issue 05 April 2025
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  • Universality

    Natasha Brown

    Faber, pp. 176, £14

Anthony Cummins has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In 2023 Natasha Brown published an article taking the reader behind the scenes of two interviews that she had given to newspapers in Australia and Spain while promoting her debut novel, Assembly. The point was to expose sleight of hand in the resulting write-ups, to say nothing of shabby conduct more generally.

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