The Palm House focuses on the friendship between Laura Miller (the narrator) and Edmund Putnam (known mainly as ‘Putnam’) two characters working in the London media landscape, set close to the present day. Over the course of a long weekend, they meet several times for drinks and crisps, and discuss the state of their lives, and share stories from their past. Putnam is coming to the terms with the death of his father and dealing with the arrival of a terrible new boss at Sequence, the cultural publication he has spent decades working for, and Laura is still somewhat in the shadow of her performative and over-the-top mother, and is somewhat listless in her current life and looking for ways to improve her circumstance.

Universality begins with a long first section written in the style of a journalistic ‘long read’. It recounts the tale of a crime which took place at an illegal rave on a Yorkshire farm, in which the leader of a radical anarchist movement is bludgeoned with a gold bar by a young man called Jake. In the article, presented as a kind of moral parable about class and wealth based divisions in our society, we are introduced to Jake’s mother, a populist ‘anti-Woke’ columnist who goes by the name of Lenny. We additionally meet Richard Spencer, the owner of the farm whose gold bar was used in the crime. He’s a wealthy banker who is presented as symptomatic of the ills of capitalism.