Susan Palwick's Shelter.
This is an absolutely amazing new major SF novel.

It's forty years in the future. Altruism is a treatable mental problem. AIs exist and are banned in the US, because using them would be slavery. They're doing great things in Africa though. Brainwipe is being used on criminals; it has an 80% success rate of making them new people. Pity about the others. There's a new plague called CV or "caravan virus" which comes on like the flu. Technology has advanced notably in many fields, solving some problems and creating others. Global warming is a bit of a problem too. There's a new Gaian religion that has temples mostly in parks, because of the noise of the animals. Terrorism, weird domestic terrorism, can erupt horrifyingly while people are going about their lives. You can have GPS cells in your blood to prevent kidnapping, but good luck getting away from the media.

This is a novel about memory and identity and awareness and forgiveness and what it means to be a person. It has wonderful rounded three-dimensional characters, as you'd expect from Palwick, and it does the thing SF does so well of examining human issues through the lens of the future and technology. (I especially adored the parts from the point of view of a house.) It doesn't shy away from the issues either -- of course you'd try to protect someone from brainwipe, but it would be a much easier book if they didn't need it. This isn't an easy book and parts of it are harrowing -- but it's also absolutely brilliant. It's a significant book, the sort of thing everyone intersted in SF ought to be reading and talking about.

I liked Palwicks' earlier novels, and her stunning short stories, but I like this one even more -- this may be because I care about SF more than fantasy. I think she's at the top of her form in SF here, as she was in fantasy for last year's (Mythopoeic Award nominated) The Necessary Beggar.

(Don't be put off by the odd mainstreamy cover of a house or the fact that Shelter is for some reason a trade paperback original. Publishers make some very odd marketing decisions sometimes.)