Garth Nix is a science fiction/fantasy author who lives in Australia. While his books are written for young adults, they are actually complicated enough in plotting and characterization to be adult works, they are just somewhat shorter to read.
Although Garth's books are never long enough to get into a great deal of detail about the worlds he creates, he does manage to create a sense of a world with real history and texture in a few short pages. Again, with characters, without lengthy interior monologues, he still communicates what characters are doing and why.
The first book I read of his is called Sabriel, about the rather unlikely subject of a girl at a boarding school who is also a necromancer who must save a place called the Old Kingdom from a plague of undead. While this contains some standard plot points, the improbable story is communicated with a good deal of realism.
The second book of his I read was called Shade's Children, which is somewhat "cyberpunk". It is about a futuristic world where children are raised to be killing machines by a mysterious race of overlords. A resistance movement to this system is led by the AI remnant of professor, using escaped children as his slaves. Again, the details of this world are well presented, even in the middle of a very plot filled book.
From what I have read about Garth Nix on the internet, he is a rather normal man who has worked as an editor for publishing houses because "all the deep sea diver jobs that most authors take were filled". Be that as it may, his fiction is always very imaginative.