Ancillary Justice (2013)

Ann Leckie's debut is about the manners of empire as much as its machinery. Its narrator, Breq, was once the mind of a troopship, spread through many captured human bodies; now she is down to one and has a grievance against the Lord of the Radch, who rules an annexing empire through thousands of bodies of her own. The Radchaai think bare hands indecent and call everyone 'she', because their language does not mark gender, and Breq's trouble reading the gender and status cues of other worlds shows how deeply that empire shapes the minds that serve it. The two timelines and the pronouns take some adjusting to. It was the first novel to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Clarke.