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Universality

$32.99

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Available on back-order

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

Remember – words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency.

Late one night 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 expos 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.

‘Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling.’ Andrew O’Hagan

‘Original, vital, and unputdownable.’ Tess Gunty

‘Breathtaking … a precise dissection of class, wealth and power.’ Elizabeth Day

Format: Paperback
Pages: 176
Imprint: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 13/03/2025

Staff review

Universality
by Natasha Brown
Review by Renata


This novella-length satire investigates the grubby things that breed in the petri dish of media, money and amorality. The story opens with a clickable magazine article that recounts an assault with a solid gold bar, but subsequent chapters question the credibility of the story and its tellers. Brown turns a forensically critical lens on the journalists, bankers and activists wrestling for a stake in the spin-doctoring - and ultimately judges both sides of the political spectrum to be equally self-interested.

If you like your books cozy and your characters likeable, look elsewhere! This author delights in voicing the cynical, sinister attitudes that lie just below the surface of so much populist rhetoric.

ISBN: 9780571389025 Categories: , Tag