Since 2003, Mal Peet has been quietly (too quietly, it might be argued) producing many of the finest books in young adult literature. His excellent historical novel, Tamar, won the 2005 Carnegie medal, while Exposure, a brilliant riff on Othello transposed to the world of South American football, was awarded the 2009 Guardian children's fiction prize. With Life: An Exploded Diagram, Peet has once more produced a winner: a subtle, minutely observed novel with a huge heart and a bold historical sweep.

Take a big breath before you open this book. In chapter one, a suicidal Nazi pilot swoops out of the sky, inducing a premature birth in a Norfolk rhubarb patch. Four hundred pages later we've arrived in lower Manhattan on 11 September 2001, by way of a deeply affecting first love affair and an edge-of-the-seat rendering of the Cuban missile crisis. Back at the rhubarb patch, poor traumatised Ruth staggers into the house and gives birth to Clem, an intelligent, introspective boy nudged in the general direction of the middle classes via the 11-plus. At grammar school, he encounters Jiffy the art master, who wears "brutal shoes like dead dog's noses", and teaches Clem to draw.

Life-drawing proves useful in Clem's seduction of the gorgeous Françoise, a convent-school refugee with a rebellious streak and a rich daddy. It is the early 1960s, and Peet paints their burgeoning affair in emotional colours vivid enough to induce a serious case of vicarious sexual longing. The author's sly humour is evident on every page, as when Clem tells us: "It's one of life's countless little cruelties that you never forget your first time."

And then, just as we're getting the hang of sex in a field in Norfolk, the story pulls up and out, by means of a sort of literary Google Earth. It leaves country life for the grand tableau of the cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Clem is the close-up in this huge historical scenario  employing Andrew Marvell in a desperate attempt to get his girlfriend to gather her rosebuds, preferably before the world ends. Meanwhile, the US and the USSR play who'll-blink-first in a grim battle over Cuba. And somewhere in the middle, a different sort of revolution invades the Norfolk countryside in the form of intensive farming.

Somehow it all connects, thanks to Peet's cool eye, generous sensibility and fierce intelligence. It doesn't hurt that his storytelling prowess is more than a match for the lust of his young protagonists, the inner workings of JFK's war cabinet, and the gruesome conditions inside a Russian submarine, which "tipped and slewed in the water like a drowned rocking-horse" (and also happens to be carrying an atomic bomb with America's name on it).

The question that will undoubtedly be raised in relation to this  and one that has been asked of Peet's work before  is whether it really belongs in the young adult section. From the unpublished writer who told me "If all else fails, I'll write a YA book", to Martin Amis's pronouncement that he'd have to be brain injured to write for children, the slight sneer that follows the category often suggests it's a sub-valid form of literature, OK for those not intelligent or mature enough for real books.

Life: An Exploded Diagram is a real book, a rare treat for thoughtful readers of any age. Read it yourself. Then, if you can think of a young person with the wit to appreciate it, pass it along.

Meg Rosoff's The Bride's Farewell is published by Puffin.