Beautiful Shining People

Michael Grothaus

From Shelf: Best Reads So Far 2023

A damaged young man meets an enigmatic waitress in a Tokyo cafe, and they embark on a journey that will change everything ... an emotive speculative literary novel set in a near-future Japan.

A damaged teenage tech prodigy meets an enigmatic waitress in a tiny Tokyo cafe, sparking an epic journey across Japan that will change everything, forever ... a captivating, masterful novel with an extraordinary mystery at its heart... 'Set against a tech heavy backdrop Beautiful Shining People blooms into an emotional and soulful tale that reckons with the isolation we can all feel as outsiders' SciFi Now Book of the Month 'That Beautiful Shining People isn't just a slipstream novel with pretensions to being literature is in great part down to the deftness and tenderness with which Grothaus draws his central relationship ... to let us explore a world of robots and deepfakes that's just unfamiliar enough to be exotic' SFX Magazine Book of the Month 'A fascinating exploration of what it means to be human in a world where everything can be faked ... wonderful, insightful and thoughtful' James Oswald -------------This world is anything but ordinary, and it's about to change forever... It's our world, but decades into the future... An ordinary world, where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in burger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. People get up, work, and have dinner. Everything is as it should be... Except for seventeen-year-old John, a tech prodigy from a damaged family, who hides a deeply personal secret. But everything starts to change for him when he enters a tiny cafe on a cold Tokyo night. A cafe run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia... But Neotnia hides a secret of her own - a secret that will turn John's unhappy life upside down. A secret that will take them from the neon streets of Tokyo to Hiroshima's tragic past to the snowy mountains of Nagano. A secret that reveals that this world is anything ordinary - and it's about to change forever... ------------- 'Poetically written, every word of this adventure leaps off the page with passion. A wonderful and enlightening trip' The Sun 'Cyberpunk meets bildungsroman - a real joy' Oscar de Muriel 'Exquisite world-building, this book had me invested from the very first page. Vivid plot and irresistible characters and a real tug at the soul ... you'll drown in it' Lisa Bradley 'A life-affirming, epic book about what it is to be human: to live, to dream, to hope, to love ... at a time when we most need reminding of these things' David F Ross 'Totally engrossing from the start - the story, characters and settings will linger in your imagination long after you're finished ... truly wonderful' Jonathan Whitelaw 'Masterful ... truly breathtaking and achingly beautiful. It builds anticipation and suspense before coming together in a thrilling, captivating conclusion' The Bookbag 'Outstanding! Sci-fi showing how the past might impact on the future ... a glimpse into a (very plausible) terrifying future' Michael J Malone What readers are saying... ***** 'A beautiful, emotional and thought-provoking read' 'A striking and strange novel - and a searing statement about the dangerously thin lines between utopia and dystopia' 'Just devastatingly beautiful' 'My book of the year ... no question' 'Masterful storytelling' 'Grothaus has a bewitching ability to stop time in a moment, and then run seemlessly into action with unstoppable momentum' 'Succinctly captured the feeling of Japanese fiction. I was very much put in mind of Haruki Murakami or Toshikazu Kawaguchi'