The kind of book that will just lurk at the back of your mind once you've finished it, seeping in to your general awareness, and every now and then firing off an insight into your active consciousness. Over the course of a year, members of a community in a terraced road in a fictional south England town come to realise - or at least begin to - what elements of their lives are going to support them, and what are as reliable as ... well, spider's web. To mix metaphors, as Adrian Plass says in the introduction, many Christian novels drive a pentechnicon of personal faith through the small traffic of other people's lives, and that doesn't work. This however does. It slides other small cars into the general flow and takes you with it.