A remarkable Japan-set speculative novel about quantum computing and what it means to belong in a rapidly changing world – perfect for fans of Ex-Machina and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan.
BEAUTIFUL SHINING PEOPLE
by Michael Grothaus
Vulkan, March 2023
(via Northbank Talent Management)
Tokyo, late 2040s. It’s an ordinary world, one where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in hamburger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. The new frontier: quantum computing – and it will change the world.
17-year-old coding genius John arrives in Tokyo, invited by Sony, who want to buy his quantum algorithm. One cold night he enters a small, strange cafe – a cafe run by a disgraced sumo wrestler accompanied by a peculiar dog with a spherical head. And then there’s the waitress, who hides a striking secret. There’s something different about her – a kind of splintering inside her, like there’s something in there that doesn’t belong. John might be the only person that can help her discover the truth – about what’s inside, where her missing father went, and who might be looking for them now. It’s a discovery that will take them from the neon streets of Tokyo to Hiroshima’s tragic past to the snowy mountains of Nagano, and from the safety of family to the machinations of Big Tech and man’s incessant struggle for power.
Michael Grothaus is an author and journalist from Saint Louis, Missouri, now living in London. He spent his twenties in Chicago where he earned his degree in filmmaking from Columbia and got his start in journalism writing for Screen. After working for institutions including The Art Institute of Chicago, Twentieth Century Fox, and Apple he earned his postgraduate degree with distinction in creative writing from the University of London. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Litro Magazine, Fast Company, VICE, the Irish Times, Screen, Quartz, and others. His debut novel, Epiphany Jones, was published in 2016 and his first non-fiction book, Trust No One, was published by Hodder in November 2021.
Sometimes people are lost from you, no matter how much you wish they weren’t and before you can even begin to know how big of a hole they’ll leave behind.
It’s the year 2123, and sixteen-year-old Adina has just killed nearly every person she knows. All fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty-six of them. Brought up in the East African ecobubble of Eden Five, as far as she knows the whole world had been destroyed by ecological disasters brought about by human greed for profit. The Amonston Corporation built ecobubbles across Africa to keep the remaining plant and animal species safe, and their generosity saved thousands of people.
Hannah is having a bad day. A bad month. A bad year? That feels terrible to admit, since her son Jack was born just eight months ago, and she loves him more than anything. But ever since his harrowing birth, she can’t shake the feeling that it could have gone the other way. That her baby might not have made it. Terrifying visions from different paths her life could have taken begin to disrupt her cozy, claustrophobic days with Jack, destablizing her marriage, and making her husband concerned for her mental health. Are the strange things Hannah is seeing just new mom anxiety, or is something truly weird and sinister afoot? What if Hannah really did unlock something she wasn’t supposed to during childbirth? When Hannah’s worst nightmare comes true and Jack disappears from his crib, she discovers that her reeling mind has extraordinary powers that she must tap into in order to save her child: She has the ability to enter the multiverse—and she must visit different versions of her life while holding onto what is most important to her in this one to bring her child back home. From the intimate joys of parenthood to the cosmic awe of the multiverse, THE POSSIBILITIES is an ingenious and wildly suspenseful novel that dares to stare down into the dizzying depths of maternal love, vulnerability, and strength.