Sunday book pick: In 2025 Booker Prize-longlisted ‘Universality’, everyone’s politics is for sale

“Why did I drink so much? I couldn’t stand being drunk. Though total sobriety was arguably worse. It was the in-between land I liked,” muses Miriam Leonard aka Lenny, one of the characters in Natasha Brown’s second novel, Universality.

A fool’s gold

Lenny’s longtime career as a newspaper columnist has received a sudden boost after she became one of the subjects of a young journalist’s article, after her book Woke Capitalism: How Corporations Sold Out the Working Class, hailed as a “secular Bible”, emerged as the newest bestseller, courting controversy, criticism, and adulation. She rues the conditions of the working class in Britain, where white men are being overlooked to comply with diversity requirements and liberal optics. She has strong views on race, class, sex, and economy and the inherent hypocrisy of inclusive politics. She vouches for neither, commits to nothing, yet manages to side with both sides of the argument. The trick is to keep making them guess. Drunk or sober – it doesn’t matter, as long as the sweet buzz prevails.

She’s not the only one minting money and fame on the back of nothing. She keeps her politics obscure, ruffles feathers, but in the end, it makes no dent in her lofty ideas of the self. Everything...

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