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Finished Everfair by Nisi Shawl, which was on the New Books shelf at the library. This was a fairly interesting alternate history with added steampunk and some magical mysticism, centred around the foundation of a fictional African country in response to the depredations of Belgian colonialism in the late 19th century Congo (King Leopold's infamous rubber plantations), through to conflicts related with WWI. There's a refreshingly unusual use of technology mingled with herblore and other local materials (most notably, advanced prosthetics for all the victims of Leopold's hand-chopping policies), and exploration of the various elements which keep a reasonably modern country going in the face of opposition.
The story is told in shifting viewpoints by individuals each trying to make the country succeed, or at least find their own place in it, from spies to missionaries to inventors to royalty, over the course of a few decades, and sometimes feels a little disjointed as it skips from thread to thread of each POV's occasionally somewhat fragmentary piece of the plot. But the subplots do intertwine, as the characters' lives and interactions affect the development of the story and their decisions in response to some of the political intrigue happening around them.
Recommended if you like alternate history steampunk with a political slant, especially less Eurocentric takes on it. ISFDB tells me this was a finalist for the Tiptree Award and might be up for the Nebula and while I'm not sure I'd count it among the best sfnal books I've read in the past few years, it does seem to be worthy of being in the finalist category.
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