Natasha Brown

Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Step out into a world of Go Home vans. Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy a flat. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going.The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend's family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can't escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?

Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature” (The Sunday Times).Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.An ambitious 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 that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.

A narradora deste romance é uma mulher negra britânica, com uma posição de destaque no mercado financeiro e um namorado oriundo de uma família conservadora. Seguiu todas as boas regras: ser cortês num ambiente hostil, conseguir a melhor formação superior, lançar-se numa carreira rentável, comprar um bom apartamento, comprar arte, comprar uma espécie de felicidade – e principalmente, manter-se calada, discreta e prosseguir. Agora, enquanto se prepara para participar na festa de aniversário de casamento dos pais do namorado, debate-se com algo que poderá mudar a sua vida, definitivamente. É preciso tomar uma decisão. Esta é uma história sobre as histórias de que somos feitos: de raça e classe social, de segurança e liberdade, de vencedores e vencidos. E do que significa assumirmos o controlo do nosso destino.