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 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 in 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.
Natasha Brown’s 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.
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, author of Magpie