Description

Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus

Trade Paperback – Orenda Books – Nov 2023 – 374 pages

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 ordinary – and it’ s about to change forever…