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A Novel
by Natasha Brown
Book Reviewed by:Remember—words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature" (The Sunday Times).
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, the book focuses in on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.
The thrilling 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.
A Fool's Gold
First published in Alazon magazine June 17, 2021
A gold bar is deceptively heavy. Four hundred troy ounces, about 12.5 kilograms, of ultra-high-purity gold formed into an ingot—a sort of slender brick crossed with a pyramid. Holding one such bar on a chilly September evening last year, thirty-year-old Jake marveled at its density; how the unyielding sides and edges felt awkward, yet somehow natural, in his hands. Behind him, from the main building of a West Yorkshire farm, music and colored lights throbbed against the night sky. Roughly one hundred youngsters were partying in defiance of the British government's lockdown restrictions. Jake didn't look back toward the noise pumping from the farmhouse where he'd spent most of his fraught 2020. He wasn't even looking at the gold, not really.The bar in Jake's possession was a London Good Delivery—literally the gold standard of gold bullion—worth over half a million dollars. An obscene concept; Jake couldn't ...
The concept of universality, its many layers and interpretations, is at the center of this novel from its very title. There is an anarchist movement called "Universalist" to signal inclusivity; a journalist trying to appeal to a universal audience; a question of what remains universal in an era of identity politics and globalization; and an overall story that, while rooted in Britain's media and political landscape (with mentions of The Guardian and sections named after real places in England), can resonate across the Western world. However, while the novel brims with ideas, its plot ultimately falters. The first section is compelling, but as the book progresses, it becomes more tell than show, with little to drive the narrative forward...continued
Full Review
(772 words)
(Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández).
Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk
Another sharp serve from a brilliant mind. Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch
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. I emerged from this novel with the conviction that the murder victim Brown is here to avenge is discourse itself... . Original, vital, and unputdownable.
In 1963, Jimmy Breslin chronicled the death of John F. Kennedy from the point of view of the man who dug his grave. Instead of joining the big names in journalism in awaiting statements of grief from world leaders, he went to the cemetery where the US president was to be buried in order to write "It's an Honor," a piece that told the story of America's reaction to the assassination from the perspective of the "common man." Breslin found a unique way to look at and narrate the events of the president's death that separated him from his journalist peers. Universality, the second novel by British author Natasha Brown, begins with a lengthy account of the attempted assassination of an anarchist leader on a farm in the English countryside. The ...
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