Wow. The best scifi I've read in several years. I am a sucker for stories about one person's life set against the backdrop of some huge cosmological event. I think that's why I love Ted Chiang's stories so much as well. 
 'Spin' basically takes one bizarre event (a shield is put around the earth that greatly slows time while the rest of the universe continues on) and runs with the idea. How do people react? What effect does this have on our government? You follow the protagonist for 30 years or so on earth as billions of years pass in the rest of the universe. While this would sound like a horrible catastrophe, Wilson does a great job of realistically portraying the fact that most people generally do just solier on, even when the going gets weird. 
 I don't think I've read any other Robert Charles Wilson novels before - will definitely be picking up the rest of his work.