Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

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This book is many things: technothriller, travelogue, love story, philosophical treatise about the nature of humanity. I seriously could not put this book down and when the change in pace and location occurs there was no prying this book from my hands! His latest novel is BEAUTIFUL SHINING PEOPLE , a speculative coming-of-age story set in Tokyo that explores how the things that cast us as outsiders can be the very things that draw us together, and examines whether there is an inherent meaning in the world to come, or if we must create our own.

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. I've read several books lately that are set in Japan, current day and/or near future and I have to say they're fast becoming one of my favourite genres.His debut novel, EPIPHANY JONES, 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. Each is flawed, and each has suffered tragedy, yet their broken pieces fit together to make something special. It starts out calm and chilled but with a twist of anguish from the secret shame John is hiding, then the air fills with the flush of first love as he and Neotina get closer, before moving into an atmosphere that crackles with danger as shocking revelations change their entire world. The central characters, alongside those connected to their stories, were wonderfully textured with mysterious pasts and their depth made it very easy and enjoyable to be invested in their story arcs. Told from the perspective of John, a seventeen-year-old American who has been labelled technology's newest prodigy, the story begins with him landing in Japan in preparation for a business meeting with Sony.

How different is Neotnia's situation to that of someone whose parents' key reasons for having them were (for example) to have a relative to look after them in old age, to create a compatible medical donor for a sick sibling, or mould their child into an international tennis champion? A café run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia.There are some big questions that we really need to be wrestling with as our technological progress outstrips our ability to frame ethical boundaries. We follow John and Neotnia as they go to the cinema; celebrate Halloween with Goeido; spend a day in the care home where Neotnia regularly volunteers; go for a spontaneous, illicit swim; and drink instant hot chocolate while watching TV together. The beginning was just a little too quirky for me, and I wasn’t sure what to make of the story initially. At first sight be may seen a classic, antisocial geek but - as we learn - there is more to him than that, John is also different in another way but he wants to be 'normal' and there is talk of surgery to bring this about.

Just like John, each of them holds a secret, and in delving deeper to discover Neotnia's, John will find everything he has ever known turn upside down and inside out. 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. He’s selling it to Sony as there’s something wrong with his body and he would like to use some of the money to fix it. That there are other people out there who have the same thoughts and fears about the direction the world is taking and what could be looming in the future but, whilst these concerns are real and profound, that there is still a thread of hope that runs through it all and that, if we stick together, we can make the future better if we learn from the past.

Plus it’s 30-odd years into the future and people are still flying across the world to sign contracts? It is readable too, though its plot holes and some the character’s scarcely credible reactions can be occasionally infuriating. This novel may have a spec fiction setting, being set a few decades ahead in the high-tech world of Tokyo, but at its heart is a story about people, and in particular the growing relationship between a young American coding genius, John, and Neotnia, the enigmatic girl working in a cafe late one night.