Why a Booktrail?
Future: A damaged young man meets an enigmatic waitress in a Tokyo café, and they embark on a journey that will change everything.
Beautiful Shining People
What you need to know before your trail
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…
Travel Guide
A futuristic Tokyo, apan
This is a world with robots and all kinds of AI. This is a world where nothing is as you expect and nothing will be the same again.
The cafe where the novel and story ‘kicks off’ is particularly memorable:
“The door’s bell clangs as I enter, and my eyes immediately go to the dog with the spherical head perched on the counter. Despite the eternal surrealness of the dog’s geometry, the cafe has a distinctly different feel tonight. There’s no still ness in the air and no muted silence. The world outside and the world in here are indistinguisable.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Beautiful Shining People
Destination/location: Tokyo Author/guide: Michael Grothaus Departure Time: Future
Back to ResultsWhere Next?
