A woman is recalled to Britain from the Arctic, where she has spent twenty years working with people who build their houses from snow, and given the task of investigating 'the predicament of the house'. She discovers that in Britain, unlike in Japan, the global economy has not managed to bring down the price of new houses, and indeed the principal effect of the digital economy has been to create wealth which has raised the market price of the existing, dilapidated housing stock. In a supermarket, the kind of building to which the techniques of low-cost mass building have been successfully applied, she meets an old friend and they fall in love; they look for somewhere to settle down