Beautiful Shining People

A damaged teenage tech prodigy meets an enigmatic waitress in a tiny Tokyo café, 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

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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 café on a cold Tokyo night. A café 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…

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‘Poetically written, every word of this adventure leaps off the page with passion. A wonderful and enlightening...