Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

Product Information

It made me smile, it made me weep, it made me turn the pages faster and faster, holding my breath in suspense. Lonely and not sure what to do with himself, one night John visits a café, where he meets former sumo wrestler Goeido - its owner - young waitress Neotnia, and her unique-looking dog, Inu. A café run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia. Unlike last night, every inch of her body is now concealed below the neck, from the ends of her ankle-length grey skirt to the collar of the black, long-sleeve T-shirt. Each character was so well developed and an integral to the storyline that you couldn't help but feel the bonds that tied them and want to be part of their group.

Setting is key in this book and I don't think there could be a better location than Tokyo for this book. A wonderfully affecting love story with a major twist at its centre, a slow-motion quest with chivalric aspects. Given that AI is a really hot topic at the moment, this is a novel that capitalises on fears and mistrust, yet somehow adds a dimension of normality to a concept that is only just finding its feet. While in parts he did come over as a bit immature, it’s is easy to like his flawed character and development. It was a mesmerising story that almost shows the reader a glimpse of what could be in both a lovely and terrifying way.

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.

I liked that much of the book was focused on the flaws of the characters and how this impacted their daily lives.It's a truly beautiful story of friendship, trust and love and it's most definitely highly recommended.

But it is also romance with both some steam and an almost doomed/forbidden vibe… And maybe even a touch of family drama and mystery thrown in to spice things up. The idea that we, humans, can create such powerful, destructive technological forces has stuck with me. Not a man you'd want to cross, for obvious reasons, but he has his own emotional past that is brought to the surface, one which makes his stern demeanour all the more understandable. There are lots of themes covered in this story: relationships, belonging, loneliness, finding the meaning of life, but also there is a darker side to it all. Grothaus' captures the electricity of the city streets perfectly whilst also describing rural Japan in lovely detail.It is readable too, though its plot holes and some the character’s scarcely credible reactions can be occasionally infuriating. The world, brilliantly drawn so that it seamlessly stitched together the present with an evolving future, with its men who would play God is anathema to my own hopes for the future, alongside a group of people that represent the limits of those boundaries but made me burst the very human emotional banks of empathy and compassion. As they start to navigate their relationship and their position in an ever-shifting, precarious world, each of them harbors a secret that they are desperate to keep from the other.