Life: An Exploded Diagram, By Mal Peet

If you're reading this, it's because the Rapture didn't happen after all. (Or if it did, you were one of those left behind. Sorry about that.) This probably won't have come as a surprise, not least because we have been promised the end of the world before, yet the world has stubbornly gone on not ending.

One such moment, where a small cult of believers anticipate judgement day only to have to shuffle sheepishly back home afterwards, features in Mal Peet's brilliant new novel set in Norfolk in 1962. And while The Brethren's predicted Armageddon doesn't happen, the story is told against the backdrop of a more believable threat to the future of the planet, as Kennedy and Khrushchev went eyeball-to-eyeball over some missiles in Cuba and waited to see who blinked first.

For Clem Ackroyd, the imminent end of the world is a big problem. Aged 16, a working-class lad in Norfolk, he's yet to lose his virginity. He meets the right girl – Frankie Mortimer, daughter to the landowner for whom his father works. She falls for him, too. And as Clem's delicious frustration builds – wondering if he and Frankie will get a chance to do it before the sky falls on their heads – so does the story, to an incredible climax... And not the kind you're expecting.

Alongside Clem's narrative we intermittently glimpse the high-voltage wranglings in Washington, as JFK and his military advisers argue about how to avoid blowing up the world. This motley crew includes Commandant David Shoup, whose way of speaking "involved biting off bits of the English language and randomly spitting them out in lumps of profanity". It conveys a sense of Clem and Frankie's story mattering deeply, while at the same time being only one in a potential world full of equally meaningful, important, individual stories.

From the expansive opening section, which introduces several generations of Clem's family, Peet moves us effortlessly through time. His book jumps in chronology and shifts in scale: one paragraph begins with the ship Granma bound for Cuba carrying Fidel and Che, and ends with Brian Woods throwing Clem's cap on to the back of a passing lorry. And it does so with pin-sharp humour. If you're counting down to an imminent doomsday, you could do worse than to spend a few of your remaining hours reading this.

Daniel Hahn is joint interim director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, Norwich