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.
"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
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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.
Polite conversation is rarely either.
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