Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus
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 but ordinary – and it’s about to change forever...
About the author
Michael Grothaus is a novelist, journalist and author of non-fiction. His writing has appeared in Fast Company, VICE, Guardian, Litro Magazine, Irish Times, Screen, Quartz and others. His debut novel, Epiphany Jones, a story about sex trafficking among the Hollywood elite, was longlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and named one of the 25 ‘Most Irresistible Hollywood Novels’ by Entertainment Weekly. His first non-fiction book, Trust No One: Inside the World of Deepfakes was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2021. The book examines the human impact that artificially generated video will have on individuals and society in the years to come. Michael is American..
Review
I could do this review in one line;
‘Beautiful Shining People is an outstanding book and you NEED to read it!’
But it deserves so much more as this novel has blown my mind and already is my top read of this year! I wish I was still in that world as it was beautiful, haunting, stunning and gorgeous. It is going to be very hard to knock this stunner off my top spot! It is hard to review ‘Beautiful Shining People’ as it can not be pigeonholed neatly into a genre as it is part YA but it deals with distinctly adult themes, it's a ‘sci-fi’ novel but yet it isn't as it's only set 30 years in the future, its kind of a thriller but its also a deep dive into relationships, friendships and humanity. It's so nuanced that you can't really categorise where this would be shelved in a library but that's why I loved it!
This is my first book by Michael but I will be going to read the rest of his work as I was blown away by the standard of writing, the brilliant characterisation and his ability to create a world that was instantly formed in my mind! Having the book set in Japan helped immensely with the world setting as we already know Toyko as a centre for the hi-tech, a world of fantasy and whimsy. Therefore, we readers could easily take the extra leap to where all cars are being self-driven, info bots, artificial intelligence, robots with hamburger heads, a world which now fights wars on the internet with fake information and more scaringly deep fakes. But the thing is all this already exists presently but Michael has just taken it a couple of levels further and it is due to this that you readily accept this new world and don't even blink an eye when something odd happens! Plus, this being interlaced with the ancient Japanese beliefs of Shintoism, kamis, shrines and temples truly made thos book for me. Gosh, I am probably going to use every superlative in the dictionary for this review as I'm finding it hard to review this one!
This is basically a story about what makes a human tick, our searches and struggles to understand our place here in society and how society shapes us. Our two protagonists are struggling to understand the big ‘why’ questions and as the author leads us in their journeys it makes for a beautiful and thought-provoking read. John is a tech genius who has travelled to Japan to sell some of his quantum codings to Samsung when one jet-lagged night he is in search of a coffee. He stumbles across a cafe where he meets a young Japanese woman Neotnia who randomly gives him an ear cleaning. But he leaves his backpack there by mistake and returns the next morning to retrieve it. A friendship forms between the two which is beautiful yet weird at the same time. John is attracted to Neotnia but is unsure of her feelings as she flips flops from being distant to being fun and charming and back again. It doesn't help that her boss ex sumo Guido sends them silent glares whenever they are in the cafe. John is trying to escape his past whilst Neotnia is desperately seeking answers to hers. John is open where Neotnia can be guarded and as to the reasons for this…well, I wouldn't want to spoil the book. As much as I loved John and Neotnia the character I adored was Guido as there was so much to his past that influenced his present. I would love him to be in my corner! But he has to bring his adorable dog Inu with his perfectly groomed head with him.
I seriously could not put this book down and when the change in pace and location occurs there was no prying this book from my hands! Wow, that is all I have to say. It was a very dramatic and chilling conclusion and I was crying my wee heart out. Now, I don't really cry when reading books, apart from A Little Life, so when a book does it means it's something that is special and hard-hitting. Which this book certainly is. Those last scenes were outstanding and that last sentence totally made my day! I found this book to be mesmerising, beautifully written, and I think it is a masterpiece! It was moving and powerful. Able to hit you right in the solar plexus and then give you a loving caress on the next page. It's truly phenomenal and it will stay with me for a long long long time.
