The one really first rate recent SF novel I can recall is: "This is how you lose the time war" [0] by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It's far from being Hard SF if you like that (I do) but the humour and poetry of it won me over very fast. I bought it purely on the basis of the delicious title!
The "Lady Astronaut" series [1] by Mary Robinette Kowal is not first rate, but it is reliably entertaining and a fairly Hard SF alternate history with some interesting choices.
I'm going to take a liberty and also recommend a much older SF book that I rarely see mentioned; "Fiasco" by Stanisław Lem. This one's all about the characterization and the big picture of humanity's fatal flaws. Not hard SF as such, but he tells a good tall tale when he needs to mess with space and time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How_You_Lose_the_Time_...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/193730-lady-astronaut-unive...