Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

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It's rather a slow burn at first as we get to know John, Neotnia, and her father figure Goeido, a disgraced former sumo wrestler, and we discover that all have secrets, which in Neotnia's case will lead to a quest to find her real father, taking them from Tokyo to Hiroshima and onto Nagano.

A striking, surreal novel which blends genre, Beautiful Shining People is a thought-provoking story which will leave you quietly musing its meanings for a long time after you've finished. It is a beautiful, emotional and thought provoking read, peppered with action and the thrill of a chase, heavy in technology, but bound by compassion. The near-future depicted (the SF strand to the story) adds to that unease, as John begins to receive cryptic messages from the AI-infused bots that seem ubiquitous, and we see casual examples of the uses and abuses of the underlying technology behind them. Set against a tech heavy backdrop, Beautiful Shining People blooms into an emotional and soulful tale that reckons with the isolation we can all feel as outsiders and how a little bit of self love, along with love for another can change your world view.

The beginning was just a little too quirky for me, and I wasn't sure what to make of the story initially. Our guide through this world is John, an American teenage computer prodigy who is visiting the country for the first time as he negotiates the sale of his computer code to Japanese tech giant, putting the reader firmly in the shoes of an outsider learning about the society as he stumbles through it. His debut novel, EPIPHANY JON ES , a story about sex trafficking among the Hollywood elite, was longlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger Award and named one of the 25 “Most Irresistible Hollywood Novels” by Entertainment Weekly.

And with that smile a fist again contracts inside my chest and I feel the air go just a little bit thin. 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.

Beautiful Shining People is both an intriguing thriller and a meditation and is in places unforgettable and affecting. I’m starting to think publisher Orenda Books has a secret Indiana Jones-style warehouse filled with talented authors and quirky books.

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.This book is many things: technothriller, travelogue, love story, philosophical treatise about the nature of humanity. In short, it is a fantastic mash-up of different genres and elements, and a story you won’t soon forget with a cast of characters that will win over your heart long before that final page. I LOVED the character of Neotnia though, everything I want to say about her would probably be spoiling the book but she was an amazingly written character and deserved so much better than what she got. You'll laugh when you know you shouldn't, be moved when you least expect it and, most importantly, never look at Hollywood, celebrity or sex in the same way again.