Longlisted For The Booker Prize 2025
'Brave, wry, cool, and thrilling.' Andrew O'Hagan
'Original, vital, and unputdownable.' Tess Gunty
'Breathtaking ... a precise dissection of class, wealth and power.' Elizabeth Day
In the new novel from the author of Assembly, a viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers.
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 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.