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Book Summary and Reviews of Universality by Natasha Brown

Universality by Natasha Brown

Universality

A Novel

by Natasha Brown

  • Publishes:
  • Mar 4, 2025, 176 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Remember—words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature" (The Sunday Times).

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 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, namely: Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

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

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Reviews

Media Reviews

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

"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

This information about Universality was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Natasha Brown Author Biography

Natasha Brown has spent a decade working in financial services, after studying Maths at Cambridge University. She developed Assembly after receiving a 2019 London Writers Award in the literary fiction category.

Other books by Natasha Brown at BookBrowse
  • Assembly jacket
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