Universality
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Natasha Brown
About this listen
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 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.
©2025 Natasha Brown (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Another sharp serve from a brilliant mind.”—Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk
“Universality is smart and expansive, keen on the intricacies of language and class.”—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“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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