Universality

Natasha Brown

Hardcover

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One of Literary Hub's 'Most Anticipated Books of 2025'
One of the BBC's '40 Most Exciting Books to Read in 2025'
Remember--words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power.

"Original, vital, and unputdownable."--Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

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 newspaper 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. Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

A thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.

Book Details

Publisher: Random House
Publish Date: Mar 4th, 2025
Pages: 176
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.35in - 5.59in - 1.02in - 0.57lb
EAN: 9780593977309
Categories: • Literary• Political• World Literature - England - 21st Century

About the Author

Natasha Brown was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Her debut novel, Assembly, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Praise for this book

"In what is proving to be her signature architecture--a compact, cunning design of secret passageways--Brown immerses the reader in a house of haunted language. Fixing its attention on the cultural mutations of the extraction economy, Universality implicates everyone and condemns no one. I emerged from this novel with the conviction that the murder victim Brown is here to avenge is discourse itself. . . . Original, vital, and unputdownable."--Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch

"Universality is smart and expansive, keen on the intricacies of language and class."--Raven Leilani, author of Luster

"I think that is the book everyone will be reading and talking about in 2025. Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling, Universality is the kind of fiction that makes you sit up and feel alive."--Andrew O'Hagan, author of Caledonian Road

"Another sharp serve from a brilliant mind."--Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk

"Ambitious and stimulating . . . Brown's narrative is less concerned with the crime than with astutely portraying the thorny, complex ways that class and race seep into news, information, and language itself--and how they can be utilized for personal gain. As in Susan Choi's Trust Exercise and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, part of the fun is in seeing where the story will jump to next, and the ways in which each new perspective changes the reader's understanding. The result is a dizzying and fascinating tale."--Publishers Weekly, starred review