Luminous

Luminous follows three siblings pulled apart long ago, two human and one a robot, as a missing-child-robot investigation drags their fractured family back together in a reunified Korea where robots are everywhere but legally still property.

Eleven-year-old Ruijie scavenges a junkyard of discarded robots to keep her own failing body running, until she finds a robot boy unlike anything she's seen. Jun, a transgender man whose body was mostly rebuilt after the Reunification War, works Robot Crimes and is assigned to find a missing child-model robot named Eli. Morgan, an engineer at the robotics company Imagine Friends, is secretly developing a new child robot modeled on a robot from their shared past.

As the three storylines converge, Silvia Park's debut uses a near-future thriller frame to ask searching questions about what separates a person from a machine built to be loved like one, and about the ways families fracture and, sometimes, find their way back.