A damaged young man meets an enigmatic waitress in a Tokyo cafe, and they embark on a journey that will change everything... an emotive 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 cafe on a cold Tokyo night. A cafe 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...
Publisher: Orenda Books
ISBN: 9781914585647
Number of pages: 384
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
This book was just beautiful: heartbreaking, enthralling, and unique. Michael Grothaus stitches together so many disparate and genre-binding themes over the course of the book that the result is hard to pin down, yet... More
It’s getting harder and harder to write reviews for Orenda Books. Honestly, I’m starting to approach them with trepidation because my words feel entirely inadequate to convey the feelings that the writing published by... More
Wow, wow, wow. I adored, loved, devoured Beautiful Shining People. I don't normally enjoy novels set in the future but this one blew me away with its humanity, emotion and ability to make me absolutely bawl my... More
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