Outside the SF genre, I just finished White Teeth by Zadie Smith. She was 25 when it was published, and it will probably take me 25 years of writing every day before I can write as well as her. That said, there were some bits that started to get on my nerves, such as the running gag where liberal-minded, tolerant Anglo-Saxons blurt out offensive things without quite realizing it.
Back in the SF genre, Nancy Kress's Maximum Light is sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me. I've read a whole bunch of Kress's short stories but this is my first novel.