Patience

You could argue about whether this book is science fiction, or a case of a "literary" author dabbling in genre from an ironic distance— especially since the main character repeatedly mocks the premise of his story as "sci-fi bullshit," and that premise is time travel— but what matters to me is that this is fantasy being used to do what it can do: make the emotional level of a story literal. Time travel is about bringing stages of life and points of view together that can't meet in reality. There's a man plagued by loss and regret, he badly needs to know things there's no way to know, and a device he doesn't understand allows him to stalk his wife in her past— with sort of good intentions, but this isn't a stable person, and not surprisingly things go wrong.

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Aurora

Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson (2015)

This is about the last two generations of people aboard a 160-year space flight to an Earthlike world. Problems arise, divisions happen. Most of the familiar plot devices of other "generation ship" stories are absent: no one's forgotten what the mission is, no one's deceived about the nature of the ship [*], there haven't been any catastrophes back home, there aren't any advanced aliens. That doesn't make this a better or worse or more "realistic" story, but it lets Robinson focus on the kinds of things he is very good at.

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