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Universality

Natasha Brown

In the new novel from the author of Assembly, a viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers.

107 in stock

£14.99£12.99
Format
Hardback
ISBN
9780571389018
Date Published
13.03.2025
Delivery
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Summary

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.

Critic Reviews

Terrific ... Brown is a talented satirist, for sure, and her commitment to contemporary detail is impressive ... an incisive exploration of the power dynamics of storytelling.

Observer
Critic Reviews

Smart, twisty and original.

David Nicholls
Critic Reviews

Confirms Brown as one of the most intelligent voices writing today ... Brown knows that her readers’ biases are the most satisfying currency she can trade on and so creates, in a mere 156 pages, an impressive matryoshka doll of a story, where each established fact is progressively re-rendered with increasing detail and nuance ... an observational satire about the language games that enable that process. To this end, Brown is one of our most intelligent voices writing today, able to block out the short-term chatter around both identity and language in order to excavate much more uncomfortable truth.

Guardian Book of the Day
Critic Reviews

Universality is a satire recalling Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood eco-warriors, Bella Mackie’s ridicule of the rich and the derision of the media found in Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human FailingsUniversality is very funny. Brown is an astute political observer, easily dismembering cancel culture and our media circus ... Brown is a daring writer, and with her witty, often savage prose, she sees through every one of us.

New Statesman
Critic Reviews

A breathtaking talent - Natasha Brown is probably my favourite young British novelist. Universality is a precise dissection of class, wealth and power, written with a spareness that elevates and electrifies her prose. It's both intelligent and very entertaining. I didn’t think Brown could better her debut, Assembly, but - improbably - she has. Utterly phenomenal.

Elizabeth Day
Critic Reviews

I think Universality is the book everyone will be reading and talking about in 2025. It provides a brilliant, unusual social x-ray of modern Britain, stylishly exposing our moral ecosystem. Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling, this is the kind of fiction that makes you sit up and feel alive.

Andrew O'Hagan, author of CALEDONIAN ROAD

NatashaBrown

Natasha Brown is a British novelist. Her debut novel Assembly was Foyles Fiction Book of the Year, shortlisted for several awards, and has been translated into 17 languages. She was a 2023 Granta Best of Young British Novelist and a 2021 Observer Best Debut Novelist.

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NatashaBrown

Natasha Brown