Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

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This is an exception to the usual genres I would read, and at first I was a little sceptical about the robots, technology and AI talk but I’m glad I stuck it out.

She finds out that she wasn't given these because, as an android originally designed purely to care for people, it was not envisaged that she would need them. In a world of surveillance, fake news, and simulations of world leaders, how do you tell fact from fake? The presentation covers topics such as Ezra's interests; these are jigsaws, metal detecting, trains and badminton, Ezra's genre and Ezra's personality, which is labelled as "BORING". The writing is just beautiful, the world building impeccable, the characterisation so compelling that I read this book in one sitting because I was so invested in the people and the relationships depicted within.

John might be the only person that can help her discover the truth – about what’s inside, where her missing father went, and who might be looking for them now. Beautiful Shining People, by Michael Grothaus, is set in Japan in the 2040s, where seventeen-year-old American programmer John is staying while waiting to seal a deal with Sony for a novel translation app he’s written using quantum code, which is opening up new possibilities. The leaves rustle as the café’s pinkish-peach exterior comes into view, but a weight hits my chest as I notice the sandwich board isn’t on the pavement.

The story is underpinned by mystery and suspense, but it is so wonderfully textured and nuanced that it is also so much more. At first sight be may seen a classic, antisocial geek but - as we learn - there is more to him than that, John is also different in another way but he wants to be 'normal' and there is talk of surgery to bring this about. Time enough to get his ears waxed (yes, really), meet a girl, arouse the suspicions of a Sumo wrestler, get drunk, fall in love, discover his girlfriend’s not exactly what she seems and head off into the hills for answers. This is my first time reading a book written by Michael Grothaus and most definitely will not be my last. While in parts he did come over as a bit immature, it’s is easy to like his flawed character and development.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. These two narratives pulled at me throughout the reading, like a hologram card that first appears to be one thing and then slides into another. It’s a novel steeped in the style of David Mitchell’s Japanese novel Number9 Dream or Nick Bradley’s The Cat and the City—mystical novels that dovetail contemporary Japanese culture with older traditions whilst adding a dash of fantasy or science fiction elements.

It's a very believable future, sketched in rather than info dumped, the pluses and minuses senses rather than declaimed. As Ezra begins performing the chorus, the scene changes to a young child in a suit presenting a presentation to the children from the previous scene. The world didn’t seem unrealistic to me and there was so much mystery and YA intertwined that I actually grew to love their strange, futuristic world!

The narrator is John, an a8 year old American coding genius who has come to Tokyo to sell his quantum code apps to Sony for a lot of money.

Told from the perspective of John, a seventeen-year-old American who has been labelled technology's newest prodigy, the story begins with him landing in Japan in preparation for a business meeting with Sony. This is a near-future thriller set in Japan told from the point of view of a 17 year old coding genius with a body image problem. It is readable too, though its plot holes and some the character’s scarcely credible reactions can be occasionally infuriating.The man (who is an ex-sumo wrestler) is holding a dog, a Bichon Frise, with the strangest haircut ever, making its head appear spherical. Each is flawed, and each has suffered tragedy, yet their broken pieces fit together to make something special. sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia. On a chance encounter, he enters a cafe where he meets a young Japanese waitress, a sumo wrestler and a dog with a perfectly spherical head. Taking the action away from the city to Nagano is a very clever move, marking a real change in the tone of the novel and gearing us up for a very dramatic, and intense conclusion.