Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus

I'm jumping forward from 16th century Italy to a Japan of the future for the last of today's reviews - Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus. This was a book I nearly said no to as I just wasn't sure from the blurb that I would enjoy it - it's a long way from my usual fare. And I'm not the biggest fan of the cover, so I very nearly passed on it. But I am so, so glad I said yes! More of that below. Huge thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me and to the publisher for my review copy. I will be buying my own paperback copy.

The Blurb

A young man meets an enigmatic waitress in a Tokyo café, and they embark on an journey with profound implications for everyone … an emotive, EPIC and absolutely UNFORGETTABLE speculative literary novel set in a near-future Japan.

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…

Beautiful Shining People is published by Orenda Books and will be released this Thursday. 

My Review

Oh my heart! I was left reeling at the end of this one and it was so unexpected! As I mentioned in my intro I was unsure that this would be a book for me, full as it is of bots, drones, driverless cars, meta lenses and quantum coding, but I was intrigued enough to take a look. 

John is a young American man in Tokyo to finalise the sale of  his app to a tech giant. His background has been difficult and we know fairly early on that there is something about his appearance that troubles him deeply but not what it is. Struggling to sleep in a new city and new time zone he finds a cafe open late into the night offering ear cleaning. Here he meets ex sumo Goeido, pet dog Inu and beautiful young waitress Neotnia. That ear cleaning changes his life forever, as it does the lives of Neotnia and Goeido. 

You can tell a lot about someone by the way they treat service people, waiters and the like. John is unfailingly polite, and interested in them, even when they're bots with heads shaped like burgers. I loved that. He's a kind young man, with a good heart who cares about his family. But he is full of sadness and carries burdens that he shouldn't have to. Meeting Neotnia knocks him sideways. A couple of years older, very beautiful and interested in him. It was beautiful to read their burgeoning friendship. I loved Goeido too. It takes us a while to get to know him, especially as he doesn't speak English, but it's worth it when we do. And Inu? Well, you really need to read about this very unusual dog.

The scene setting is amazing. Although set in the future and therefore a very different world, I was able to picture Tokyo, colourful, full of adverts stretching storeys high and music, streets teeming with people. I loved the description of the Akihabara area of Tokyo in the run up to Halloween 'If a cosplay convention had a baby with the world's largest street carnival, this would be the offspring.' And this description of a different group of people made me smile 'They're hipsters, dressed retro like it's the 2020s all over again.' Away from Tokyo, in the mountains of Nagano, I would love to see the Orange torii over the waterfall there (not sure it's real, though it certainly felt it), so dangerous yet so beautiful and very important in this story (would have been my choice of cover, actually). 

There are a lot of techy bits in this book, relating to coding and such, and I'm not really sure that I understood them all. But that doesn't matter one bit because this book is full of heart and emotion and that's what's important here. The storyline will hook you and you will be on this journey with these young people. It's gripping and surprisingly tense, particularly at the denouement, which I read twice to make sure I hadn't missed anything. You see, I cried through the first read. The second one too, actually. Proper ugly cried. I definitely had a book hangover after this book. 

In Beautiful Shining People, Michael Grothaus has given us a novel set in a world powered by tech I don't understand. But the beautiful story within its pages addresses huge themes that will touch everyone - family, friendship, love, loss, grief and, ultimately, what it means to be human. It's stuck with me and I'm sure it will with you too. I am so glad I took a chance on this as it will be amongst my top books of the year for sure. Very highly recommended.  

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.