The Cloud Chamber

'When all the world and love were young, in Cambridge 1931, a youth stepped through old gates and saw a new world at the atom's core.'

Walter Dunnachie has arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory after a six-week journey from the other side of the earth. He has fallen in love with Grace, the spirited young adventuress he met on the ship that carried them from Australia to England, and his head is filled with the unshakeable belief that science and pacifism together hold the key to all the riddles of the world.

Fifteen years later Walter's ideals lie in tatters. The wonders he witnessed in Cambridge have led directly to the destruction of Hiroshima, and he cannot forgive his mentors - the charismatic founders of nuclear physics - for this betrayal. Tortured by images of the horrors he has helped to unleash, he struggles to hold together his marriage with Grace, and to come to terms with the arrival in London of his fellow scientist and one-time best friend, Alan Nunn May.

For Nunn May has returned from Canada, carrying with him a secret as deadly as any that have been kept or betrayed in the six years of the war. And when he tracks down his old friend to ask for his understanding, he unwittingly entangles Grace and Walter's fate with his own.

'The Cloud Chamber' is a story of friendship and betrayal, of forgiveness and enduring love and of the precious, but dangerous burden of scientific knowledge.