At two minutes to six on December 27th 1908 the lives of three people become inextricably bound together by the trajectory of a snowball. There is ten-year old Dunstable Ramsay, intended victim of the snowball, who, fatefully, ducks; his ''lifelong friend and enemy'' Percy Boyd Staunton, angered by their recent quarrel, who hurls the snowball; and Paul Dempster, prematurely born when his pregnant mother is struck by Percy''s icy missile. Tracing the rich and varied lives of these three individuals, The Deptford Trilogy lures the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic in one of the most beguiling, clever and cunning trilogies ever written.