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 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’