The central idea here is suspended animation through deep freezing, something I'm surprised no-one else has written about (that I've read, at least). It borders on time travel here, since if and when you are revived, you have arrived in the future. Perhaps because people can freeze themselves now, it is somehow excluded from sci-fi... whatever. I liked this book.
The main character is a composer of music with the quite outstanding name of Drake Merlin. His wife, whom he has unending passion for, is named Anastasia. Charles Sheffield wastes no time in killing her off with an inoperable type of cancer, causing great change in Drake's life. He immediately has her frozen in the most reputable fashion, and set out to gather wealth, both of monetary and knowledge, to add himself beside her.
It is after this that his adventure to the future begins. He is repeatedly awoken and each time must fit into the current scheme of the universe, each time to find that even in the amazingly advanced times, his wife is beyond help. Sometimes he finds that he is needed to save countless lives, but always his main goal is the resurrection of his wife.
Although the ending was more open-ended than happily-ever-after, I felt it was deep in thought; there were many ideas raised in the second half of this book that were intriguing, and almost worthy of a whole separate novel. As I've written at the top, this is quite a good book, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys most general science fiction books.