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.
