LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION Named one of 2025's Most Anticipated Releases by The Times • Literary Hub • ELLE (UK) • The Guardian • Harper's BAZAAR • BBC Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a writer who “brilliantly illuminates the entrenched inequalities of our time” (The Guardian). 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, Universality focuses in on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. The thrilling new 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.

NUBClub really didn't have much to say about this short novel of a crime and its aftermath. Brown basically wants to tell you that the world is filled with shallow, incompetent, and/or malicious individuals and then creates a plot where all of them intersect. Booker Prize billed this novel as 'experimental,' but all that meant was that Brown took different perspectives in different chapters, which if I remember correctly happens in Chaucer. But the main issue we had with Universality is its tone. The entire story is essentially a cynical media play that is orchestrated by a valueless monster. Given that we live in a world of Newsmax and fascist presidents, I don't see how that's an original or insightful commentary. What we saw in this novel is just an obvious and thin vehicle to point out that the media is entirely false, the rich are shallow, the activists are ignorant burnouts, and the world is the plaything of the hypocritical right. We didn't know why anyone needs to read something that has so little of interest to say about modernity, and thus we're telling you not to read it.