Luminous

Three siblings were separated long ago: two are human and one is a robot. A missing-robot case now pulls the fractured family back into the same orbit. The setting is a reunified Korea, where robots are everywhere but the law still treats them as property.

Ruijie is eleven and scavenges a junkyard of discarded robots for parts to keep her own failing body going. There she finds a robot boy unlike any she has seen. Jun is a transgender man whose body was largely rebuilt after the Reunification War. He works in Robot Crimes, and his new assignment is to find a missing child-model robot named Eli.

Morgan is an engineer at the robotics company Imagine Friends. In secret, Morgan is building a new child robot, modeled on one from the siblings' shared past.

The novel is a near-future thriller told through three storylines that move steadily toward each other. It is also a family drama. It keeps returning to what separates a person from a machine made to be loved like one. It also asks how families break apart and sometimes find a way back. It is the author's first novel.