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Universality: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 (Hardback)
In the new novel from the author of Assembly, a viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers.
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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
A bold, memorable and entertaining satire, it reveals the contradictions of a society shaped by entrenched systems of economic, political and media control.
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.
Critic Reviews
Smart, twisty and original.
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 Failings … Universality 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.
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.
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.
NatashaBrown
Natasha Brown is a British novelist. Her debut novel Assembly was shortlisted for awards including the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction. Natasha was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023 and one of the Observer’s Best Debut Novelists in 2021.
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