The Just City by Jo Walton
Just the premise of this novel is pure genius: the goddess Athena who lives outside of time, plucks enlightened platonic philosophers from all over time (but mostly from antiquity and the renaissance) and brings them together as masters of the Just City as described by Plato in The Republic. 10000 slave kids are bought and brought to a remote Island to be their future philosopher kings. And you know literally from page one that things are going to go wrong, but how they go wrong is simply fascinating. The Just City has the trappings of weird science-fiction, but that's really just an excuse to set up the premise. What it is at heart is a philosophical tale of best intentions gone wrong. Superb.
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