This is one of those sci-fi books that I would put on a "must read" list. It attempts to answer the question - why does life exist on Earth, and seemingly nowhere else? And the place it ends up at definitely makes it worthy winning the 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award.
The main character is Leigh, a Dutch scientist who obsessively dives into her scientific research as an excuse to avoid facing the difficult relationship she has with her mother and their family history. It's set a little bit in the future - there have been advancements made in space technology, but the timeskip also shows Earth worse off - pollution has worsened, seas are rising and wildfires raging from the affects of climate change.
One of the reviews I saw mentioned alien contact, and although the book does have a slow build up towards this, it's not really the key part of the story. The writing is also excellent, with a lot of the focus on the characters rather than being a "hard sci-fi" kind of book.