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Universality

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Universality

By: Natasha Brown
Narrated by: Anushka Chakravarti, Clare Corbett, Daniel Weyman, Norma Butikofer
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About this listen

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 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 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.

©2025 Natasha Brown (P)2025 Faber & Faber
Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Political Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense
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Some brilliant concepts and the poetics of a mathematical analysis, genius prose. However, the articulation of their realities lacked authenticity. I couldn’t see or feel the characters ; some were cliches, others bewildering.

Too detached

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This is excellent and such a travesty it didn’t make the women’s prize list. Excellent narrators

So good I listened twice

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👩🏾‍🏫 𝔾𝔼ℕℝ𝔼: Contemporary/Literary Fiction

🎡 𝕋ℍ𝔼𝕄𝔼𝕊: Covid politics - Racial politics- Wokeness - Social Fragility

📄 ℙ𝔸𝔾𝔼 ℂ𝕆𝕌ℕ𝕋:  176

✍️ ℙ𝕃𝕆𝕋: Remember - words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency.

Late one night 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.

💟 𝔽𝔼𝔼𝕃𝕊: HAPPY PUB DAY to the book that pulled me out of my reading slump!

My my my, did she know that we'd be dealing with the current DEI conversation across the globe when she wrote this? (Talk about impeccable timing)

Brown, delivers brilliant social commentary and private discourse in a painfully direct way, giving the reader a chance to relate to the characters.
I read it, seeing myself and some people in my life in all the characters which was uncomfortable in a way I like my books to make me feel when forced to confront the biases I have to live with and the ones I hold 🙃 😅 - each POV does such a great job of layering their narrative on order to portray themselves as the 'victim' which is infuriating and so difficult to look away from!
It's a short and easy read, even if you have to sit through insufferable characters, telling themselves stories that innit they want to hear 🤣😭

fools gold

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