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This is a SF novel of ‘what if� variety. It won Hugo in 2006. I read is as a part of monthly reading in February 2020 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group.

A slight spoiler will follow in order to give an idea about the what if scenario.

The story starts with a trio of teenagers. Jason and Diane are twins, but they chose completely opposite paths: Jase is a scientist, groomed by his entrepreneur father to become a heir to the tech-empire; Diane is much more interested in spiritual and immaterial, at least partially due to her father’s fixation solely on her brother. Tyler, the narrator, is a year younger friend of the twins, in love with Diane. While they are out in the night, the stars suddenly disappear. It happened throughout the globe � the planet is covered with some kind of a barrier, disengaging it from the rest of the universe. Sun is replaced by a shining perfect disc and tides are still present, but nothing can be seen (or any signal received) thru the barrier. A bit later there is a big reveal: the space rocket can pass the barrier in both directions to find out that (view spoiler)[time goes significantly faster outside, roughly 100 mln year per one Earth year. Therefore, people can outlive our Sun, which was born 4.6 bn years ago and should expand to a red giant (with borders approx. on Earth orbit!) and then turn into a white dwarf in the next 5 bn years (or 50 new Earth years) (hide spoiler)]

The rest of the story it an attempt to deal with what happened, by joining projects to understand the barrier (Jason), religious cults to meet the End (Diane) or just live their life (by going to get MD, Tyler). There main storyline takes the characters through their lives, while the additional ‘flashforward� storyline follows Tyler as he evades the law.

The book is the first volume of the trilogy but can be read as a standalone. There is a cliffhanger at the end but after all main questions were answered.

It was a delight to read a SF novel that deals with a ‘what if� scenario that doesn’t go to the current hot social topics of a lot of modern SF, but presents a challenge for readers: “what would I do in this case?�