Favorite fiction of the year so far and request for recommendations.

[Joseph Tracy]

 I just recently went on a binge of stories and novels from Ursula Leguin’s extensive Hainish Sci-Fi/galactic anthropology works. What a pleasure. There is a collection by Library of America called Hainish Novels & Stories Volume 2, which I supplemented with The Dispossessed I was wowed to the core by her ability to imagine credible human cultures of tremendous diversity and an equal diversity of cultural interactions. Few give more thought to the worlds created while bringing us into a complexity of inner life and outer experience we easily recognize as our own human dilemmas and pleasures.  I felt my imagination being opened , challenged, expanded and cleansed and wished I could have thanked her. 
  There is a quote on the back of the book by Zadie Smith saying” Genre cannot contain Ursula Leguin: she is a genre in herself."

Looking around for some contemporary reading. Suggestions? Doerr’s Cuckoo Land? Whitehead's  Harlem Shuffle?  So much new work, so little to go on.