Universality
A Novel
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3.2 • 11 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • “A bold and memorable achievement.”—The Booker Prize 2025 judges
Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power, hailed as “a nesting doll of satire that leaves readers uncertain where their loyalties lie” (Financial Times)
“Original, vital, and unputdownable.”—Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch
AN NPR AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown's ambitious and stimulating sophomore novel (after Assembly) begins with an assault during an illegal rave on a West Yorkshire farm. The event, held in violation of Covid lockdown protocols, is recounted in a magazine article that makes up the novel's first section, which describes how the perpetrator, a lost young man named Jake, came to attack the victim, a radical activist named Pegasus, with a gold bar. The rest of the novel comprises a series of spryly shifting perspectives, as Brown traces the impact of the article on its principal figures, including its floundering writer, the divorced owner of the farm, an investment banker, and a maverick columnist who calls herself "an equal-opportunity hater." Indeed, Brown's narrative is less concerned with the crime than with astutely portraying the thorny, complex ways that class and race seep into news, information, and language itself—and how they can be utilized for personal gain. As in Susan Choi's Trust Exercise and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, part of the fun is in seeing where the story will jump to next, and the ways in which each new perspective changes the reader's understanding. The result is a dizzying and fascinating tale.
Customer Reviews
Hopelessly contrived
Starts as a promising whodunit but quickly slides into a clichéd and pretentious treatise on the class and culture wars.