Imagine cruise missiles come to an American base in South Wales in the 1980s - they are the ominous background to this novel, set among Quakers in a university city; but the writer is more interested in personal tensions - tunnel vision leading to blindness, neighbours who persecute children, burst pipes, sweet chestnuts and funerals. Like the squares on Rubik's cube, the pattern gets muddled: a foreign nuclear submarine is sighted in the Bristol Channel on the day a child is knocked off his bike, a peace camp is attacked as an old man lies ill in hospital.