Our small, intimate, precisely-known and closely-bounded lives play out against the massive sweep of history - that filtering of the everyday that pulls some events and personalities into a narrative that gets passed onwards.

Every so often, we feel our little lives play out against, intersect with, even shape, that narrative. We might be involved in the events; we may even be those personalities. Sometimes, we suddenly notice history happening: we can't rip our eyes away from the tv screen as a man jog-steps a little awkwardly and places a booted foot on the Moon, or as toy-like figures seem to float down from a burning tower. And every so often, we notice the momentous events in our own lives playing out against the momentous events of the world.

It was like this when I met my husband. We came together over a tumultuous, unexpected, poorly planned few weeks which overlapped with the March-April 2003 invasion of Iraq. I can remember looking at the papers at the time and thinking 'One day, this will be history, but what I'm going to remember is what's happening right now, right here, to me. That's so deep.' [I was 23 at the time, you'll have to forgive me.]

Mal Peet captures exactly this feeling of the miniature and the massive intersecting. In 'Life: An Exploded Diagram' Clem and Frankie experience the throes of first love against the backdrop of the great who'll-blink-first moment of the Cuban missile crisis: the teenagers race towards sex as the Russians and the Americans race towards war.

Peet's story has all sorts of cliches. Clem is a working class boy, Frankie (Francoise) is the only daughter of the wealthy land-owners who employ Clem's father. There are nasty boarding schools, a wizened granny, Nazis, and the familiar ingredients of the family saga novel: three generations, two wars, one hundred years of changing social expectations and sexual mores.

To explain how Peet takes this material and fashions it into something utterly fresh, something that just wraps you up and drags you along, is to risk taking the charm and tension and humour out of the book. Though it deals with undeniably YA material (a forbidden relationship, the terrors of losing your virginity, high school misery, unseeing and distant parents) Peet innovates wildly.

First, there's the voice: we switch numerous times between the viewpoints of an omniscient narrator, teenaged Clem, teenaged Frankie, and present day Clem, aged somewhere towards his 60s. One of the most playful and true-to-life displays of this switching is as we moved between blue-balled Clem, desperately desirous and desperately unsure, and Frankie, who has been educated by one of her friends into how to drive boys wild by making them think they're making bold and seductive progress when really they're being slowly lead through a series of strategically dropped barriers.

Then there's the insight into the adult generations. As Clem and Frankie bathe in hormones, we learn how his grandmother Win sought to pass her distrust of men and loathing of sex on to her daughter, Ruth, and achieved some success: despite George and Ruth's wartime passion (a brief interlude that resulted in Clem), their marriage is mutually, but silently, sexless. We track George as he tries to make something of himself, without getting Above Himself (a cardinal sin in their tiny Norfolk village). We watch as the little Christian sect Win has joined (after the Methodists proved themselves too frivolous for her) prepares for the end of days. Usually, adults in YA books are handy plot-props: here, any one character could have been the lead figure.

Finally, there's the great trump card. Just when this could be any other, very well told, saga, Peet pulls out into a vertiginously wide-angle view, and drops us into JFK's war room as the Hawks and the Doves counsel and bully him over the Russian arms build-up in Cuba. It sounds implausible - how do you bind that in here? - but perhaps that's because a person of my generation can have no idea of what the Cold War was actually like; a very real sense that the world might very well end, and that the advice to take shelter under a desk and cover any bare skin by pulling your jersey over your face and hiding your hands between your thighs is probably going to be useless. The potential end of the world (and a side-helping of Andrew Marvell's To his Coy Mistress) give Clem and Frankie every reason to break all the rules and Go All The Way.

As affecting as Clem and Frankie's story is, it's actually Peet's retelling of the days in October 1962 when JFK and Khrushchev drew close to a third world war that gripped me. It's not a period of history that I know much about at all, and Peet's description of the events is marvellous. He draws the figures cleanly and quickly and powerfully - JFK is getting by on a cocktail of drugs, plagued by wind, sex-mad, loathed and taunted by his military advisors; Khrushchev might come across at first as a peasant-fool, but is "as hard as a drill-bit and as cunning as a lavatory rat". He walks us through the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the "mathematics of annihilation": how much more powerful they had become between 1945 and 1962. He interweaves conversations recorded in JFK's war room with his narrative, making you blood-chillingly aware of how much this moment hinged on a bunch of men who neither liked nor trusted each other arguing their way to some kind of sane agreement (and that was just on the American side).

Like one of my other most favourite YA-but-not books, David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Peet's story is at least semi-autobiographical, without ever seeming to be so, and reminds me how we're all part of history, even if we don't make it into the textbooks. Highly recommended.