One of Debutiful's Most Anticipated Debuts of 2025
One of LitHub's 20 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Look Forward to in 2025

"One of the best science fiction novels of the year."—Locus

"A novel of huge humanity...The arrival of a major new voice in SF."—The Guardian

“Extraordinary…set in a not-too-distant future, debut novelist Silvia Park's Luminous gloriously explores the unpredictable, fading lines between man and machine.”—Shelf Awareness

"With Ishiguro-esque precision, Park dissects sentience and reality, as well as love and death...Lustrous."—Publishers Weekly

"It’s a cold stunner of a novel. Park masterfully balances complex characters in a very creative world. The family dynamics in this future-tinged novel are brilliantly written."—Debutiful

"A well-crafted take on the vagaries of memory and what it means to be human, with a satisfying investigative backbone."—Booklist

“Inventive, rollicking, and poetic, Luminous is a future classic novel about robots that reveals itself to be profoundly, beautifully human.”—Juhea Kim, author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds 

“Searching and masterful, Park’s Luminous engrossed me completely. Each broken robot, child, and warrior takes the elusive promise of family to a whole new level. I was honestly blown away.”—Sierra Greer, author of Annie Bot 

“Wildly and, yes, luminously emotional.”—Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library 

“Luminous is warm, expansive, and particular. Park renders the intersection between family and technology with wit and philosophical depth, but ultimately this is just incredibly exciting to read. It’s utterly beautiful.”—Raven Leilani, bestselling author of Luster

“Luminous is full of complex characters, damaged and broken and beautiful. It's a novel full of pleasures, big and small, gorgeous sentences from which Park weaves a rich, layered story of family and work, of history and speculation, of Korea, past, present and future. A bold exploration of what it means to have a mind, a body, a self, and even a soul. An impressive debut.”—Charles Yu, author of National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown

"[Luminous] is a spectacular debut, taking place in a thoroughly imagined, vividly written future.  Harrowing but full of heart, a work of enormous ambition and brilliance with an ending that fully justifies the title and brought me to tears."—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves