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Beautiful Shining People
Beautiful Shining People
Beautiful Shining People
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Beautiful Shining People

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A damaged young man meets an enigmatic waitress in a Tokyo cafÉ, 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 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...

LanguageEnglish
PublisherOrenda Books
Release dateMar 16, 2023
ISBN9781914585654
Author

Michael Grothaus

Michael Grothaus is a novelist and journalist who spent years researching sex trafficking, using his experiences as a springboard for his debut novel Epiphany Jones. Born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1977, he spent his twenties in Chicago, where he earned his degree in filmmaking and worked for institutions including The Art Institute of Chicago, Twentieth Century Fox and Apple. As a journalist he regularly writes about creativity, tech, subcultures, sex and pornography, the effects of mass media on our psyches, and just plain mysterious stuff for publications including Fast Company, VICE, The Guardian, Engadget, and more. He’s also done immersion journalism at geopolitical events including the Hong Kong protests against Beijing in 2014. His writing is read by millions of people each month. Michael lives in London. Follow Michael on Twitter @michaelgrothaus

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    Beautiful Shining People - Michael Grothaus

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