For those who read Darwinia, the tone and tenor of Spin are similar: a mix of science and fantastic, with a focus on human nature's reaction when faced with the inconceivable. Wilson is a master at it.

On a bright summer evening, three children on the cusp of teenhood witness the impossible: in the blink of an eye, all the stars wink out. Although the sun rises the next morning as usual, the next night the stars don't. Soon, scientists discover that a filtering membrane has been wrapped around the Earth and slowed its spin: for every hour on Earth, a million years flit by in the rest of the universe. Thus, humans face extinction – the death of their own sun – within fifty years. The story is how this knowledge, this revelation, affects the three youngsters. Their lives are painted against the largest background of humanity and its varied reaction to the knowledge that it will die in less than a century. We follow them as they grow up to adulthood and towards a seemingly fateful end.

Wilson's style is deceptively simple, so that he is able to weave a complex story on several fronts – scientific, fantastic, psychological, emotional – without seeming difficulty. The prose is elegant, incisive, yet never intrudes on the story, surprisingly intimate despite the grandeur of the theme. Because we see the plunge of Earth towards extinction through three people's eyes, three very different, fallible people, the rest falls into place. The science and fantastic aspects of the story are merely tools to explore who we are, fundamentally, and what Earth means to humanity. This Hugo-nominated novel is well worth the read.

As a child Tyler Dupree is sitting outside on a lawn one October evening with his closest friends (twins Diane and Jason Lawton) whilst the twins' parents are hosting a party. Whilst he is there the stars go out, and all the satellites in orbit plummet back to Earth.

The cause of it (it is later detemrined) is a barrier removing the Earth from the regular flow of time, obscuring all stars, including even the sun – this having been replaced by an artificial light sun.

The Earth's space agencies investigate this barrier. They discover the horrifying truth of the barrier, for time is passing much slower on Earth when compared to the rest of the Universe. So much slower than it's estimated that the Earth has only fifty years before the Sun dies.

And so Tyler and his generation face their future with the knowledge that they are the last generation on Earth, as well as the uncertainty as to the natural of those responsible for the barrier and their intentions.

Once again with a novel by Robert Charles Wilson we have a large concept that involves a sudden, initially unexplained, reality shift, and the effect this event has on mankind when viewed through the eyes of a relative few individuals - in the case of this book, the first person narrator Tyler Dupree.

This allows him to bring the story close to the reader, and to remove any reliance on scientific detail. It's a method that certainly makes his stories easier to read than they might have otherwise been – and when you are reading a tale like this it can be a very good thing not to have to sift through pages of explanation – the kind that can only serve to break any narrative flow.

This book is also quite different from the previous Robert Charles Wilson books I've read in one significant way. For this book moves around in time, visiting Tyler Dupree at various stages of his life from "the event" forward, and his involvement with the twins – Jason Dupree, the man who becomes the head of the US mission to investigate the phenomenon and the terraforming and colonising of Mars, and Diane, a woman who runs away and joins one of the new cults that spring up in the years following the Spin.

Tyler is a bystander, his life looks in on the events of his age, and through his eyes we see the story unfold from the various points in his life we visit.

It's a quite compelling book. It's an unusual concept to say the least. This man in my opinion has one of the best imaginations of all current sf writers. I am once again so impressed by this book, as I have been with just about everything else I have read by Robert Charles Wilson. Now to wait for the next one – it just cannot come soon enough.