After Ward’s 2022 literary thriller, The Schoolhouse, Our Better Natures marks a return to the philosophical preoccupations and stylistic invention of her Booker-longlisted debut, Love and Other Thought Experiments (2020). These are most apparent in an early episode when, despite the weeping wounds inflicted by her brutal anarchist husband, Andrea attends an Eindhoven University debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on the concept of human nature. After the two intellectual heavyweights rehearse their familiar arguments, Ward adds a surreal coda in which, along with Andrea, they don clown’s noses.