Book of the Week: UNIVERSALITY by Natasha Brown
On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. A plucky 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. 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 on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.
“Natasha Brown’s Universality is a compact yet sweeping satire. Told through a series of shifting perspectives, it reveals the contradictions of a society shaped by entrenched systems of economic, political, and media control. Brown moves the reader with cool precision from Hannah, a struggling freelancer, through to Lenny, an established columnist, unfurling through both of them an examination of the ways language and rhetoric are bound with power structures. We were particularly impressed by the book’s ability to discomfit and entertain, qualities that mark Universality as a bold and memorable achievement.” —Booker Prize judges’ citation