
Universality
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Norma Butikofer
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Anushka Chakravarti
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Clare Corbett
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Daniel Weyman
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By:
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Natasha Brown
About this listen
Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of power, hailed as “a nesting doll of satire that leaves readers uncertain where their loyalties lie” (Financial Times)
“Original, vital, and unputdownable.”—Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of The Rabbit Hutch
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 newspaper 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. Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.
A thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.
©2025 Natasha Brown (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Brown is one of our most intelligent voices writing today, able to block out the short-term chatter around both identity and language in order to excavate much more uncomfortable truths.”—The Guardian
“[Brown] has a sharp, unrelenting eye for the tangled dynamics that simmer underneath the surface of social interactions. . . . Universality is the sort of book that forces you to question yourself.”—The Independent
“Brings to mind a modern Jane Austen.”—The Financial Times
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Story
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace―the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are.
By: Colwill Brown
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The Californians
- A Novel
- By: Brian Castleberry
- Narrated by: Micky Shiloah, Rob Shapiro, Nancy Peterson, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s 2024, and Tobey Harlan—college dropout, temporary waiter, recently dumped—steals from the wall of his father’s house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey’s just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to a notorious tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon. A hundred years before, Klaus Aaronsohn—German-Jewish immigrant, resident of the Lower East Side—inveigles his way into a film studio in Astoria, Queens.
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The Fertile Earth
- A Novel
- By: Ruthvika Rao
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Vijaya and Sree are the daughters of the Deshmukhs of Irumi. Hailing from a lineage of ancestral aristocrats, their family’s social status and power over villagers on their land is absolute. Krishna and Ranga, brothers, are the sons of a widowed servant in the Deshmukh household. When Vijaya and Krishna meet, they forge an intense bond that is beautiful and dangerous. But after an innocent attempt to hunt down a man-eating tiger in the jungle goes wrong, what happens between the two of them is disastrous, the consequences reverberating through their lives into young adulthood.
By: Ruthvika Rao
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The Dream Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Laila Lalami
- Narrated by: Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.
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The next parable of the sower
- By Jess on 03-18-25
By: Laila Lalami
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The Unworthy
- A Novel
- By: Agustina Bazterrica
- Narrated by: Imani Jade Powers
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.
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Meh
- By MannyandJess on 04-29-25
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Counterattacks at Thirty
- A Novel
- By: Won-pyung Sohn
- Narrated by: Jo Yuan
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.
By: Won-pyung Sohn
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A Season of Light
- By: Julie Iromuanya
- Narrated by: Yinka Ladeinde, Leo Anifowose
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad, consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Consumed by survivor’s guilt and fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his sixteen-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.
By: Julie Iromuanya
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Stone Angels
- By: Helena Rho
- Narrated by: Greta Jung, Helena Rho
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Angelina Lee feels like she doesn’t belong. Newly divorced, and completely unmoored by the sudden and tragic death of her mother, she hopes studying Korean will reconnect her to her roots, but nothing about Seoul feels familiar. Further complicating matters is the resurgence of an alluring man from Angelina’s past, and fellow classmate Keisuke Ono, an irritatingly good looking Japanese American journalist who refuses to leave her alone. What she’ll barely admit, however, is the true reason behind her trip. She’s convinced the key to understanding her mother’s suicide lies in Korea.
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Wow! Just wow!
- By Elizabeth Morris on 05-05-25
By: Helena Rho
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My Documents
- A Novel
- By: Kevin Nguyen
- Narrated by: Kelly Marie Tran
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.
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A concept of a plan for a novel
- By Reader X on 04-22-25
By: Kevin Nguyen
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The Wardrobe Department
- By: Elaine Garvey
- Narrated by: Denise Gough
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mairéad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the show’s producer. But, despite her skill and growing experience, half of Mairéad remains in her windy, hedge-filled home in Ireland, and the life she abandoned there. In noughties London, she has the potential to be somebody completely new – why, then, does she feel so stuck?
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My review of the wardrobe department
- By iggynut on 02-28-25
By: Elaine Garvey
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Two Truths and a Lie
- A Novel
- By: Cory O'Brien
- Narrated by: Tim Lounibos
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a mostly underwater near-future Los Angeles, aging combat-drone veteran Orr Vue now lives a simple and small life, trading snippets of what's become the most valuable currency: information. So when the cops show up at his door looking for data on a murder he’s not even aware has happened, things get interesting for the first time in 25 years.
By: Cory O'Brien
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Goddess Complex
- A Novel
- By: Sanjena Sathian
- Narrated by: Rukhmani K. Desai
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.
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Interesting way to talk about an important topic.
- By Leslie A. M. Smith on 03-31-25
By: Sanjena Sathian