Universality: A novel

Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a writer who “brilliantly illuminates the entrenched inequalities of our time” (The Guardian).

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, Universality focuses in on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling new 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.

NATASHA BROWN is a British novelist. She was named one of Granta's Best Young Novelists in 2023 and one of the Observer's Best Debut Novelists in 2021. Her debut novel Assembly was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Fiction and has been translated into seventeen languages.

ISBN: 9781039057128
Format: Hardback
Pages: 176
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: March 04, 2025

"I think Universality is the book everyone will be reading and talking about in 2025. It provides a brilliant, unusual social x-ray of modern Britain, stylishly exposing our moral ecosystem. Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling, this is the kind of fiction that makes you sit up and feel alive." —Andrew O'Hagan, author of Caledonian Road

"Universality is smart and expansive, keen on the intricacies of language and class." —Raven Leilani, author of Luster

"I was riveted . . . piercingly sly and inspiring in its economy—and, perhaps most importantly, tons of fun. You could call it crime or you could call it literary fiction, but either way it outpaces its contemporaries in both genres with ease." —Jo Hamya, author of Three Rooms and The Hypocrite

"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. Here, Brown accomplishes the seemingly impossible: she examines a cultural illness without imposing a prescription, she centers nuance without sacrificing clarity, she creates a satire in which everyone remains fully dimensional, she offers an indictment as comical as it is chilling, and she delivers unflinching social analysis that reads like a thriller. In some of the most intentional and astute prose I've encountered, Brown becomes a detective of careless, weaponized rhetoric. 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

"Terse, elegant and prompt, Universality holds up a mirror to Britain by examining, through slapstick violence and media parody, the 'social fragility' exposed by the financial crash and the pandemic, exploited by tergiversating populists weaponising a deliberate misdefinition of wokeness for 'clicks and shares'. Another sharp serve from a brilliant mind." —Paul Mendez