Universality

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Remember – words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency.On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar.A plucky young journalist sets out to u ncover 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.Reviewing an early extract in Granta, Max Liu said for the paper:‘Universality by Brown, the author of the brilliant 2021 novel Assembly, hits so squarely at the mess we are in that it would feel hopeless if it weren’t so funny. A spare-no-one satire of pandemic-era Britain featuring a billionaire, middle-class eco activist and an anti-woke columnist, it is so sharp it made me reel and laugh out loud.’Alex Bowler said:‘Natasha’s arrival is a very significant moment for the Faber list. She is among the most distinctive writers to emerge in Britain over the past decade. Her work uses the slippery possibilities of fiction to open up fresh ground, new feelings, new questions. Universality has some of the pleasures of a mystery, a puzzle for the reader to solve – and delivers, I think, some stinging truths.’Natasha Brown said:‘I can’t wait to share Universality with readers. It’s a novel that serves up big stylistic twists with an even bigger sense of fun. Faber is the perfect home for this book, and I’m excited to work with Alex and the team over the coming months.’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. Assembly was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Orwell Prize for Fiction and has been translated into seventeen languages. Show more