About the Author: Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes is an award-winning, best-selling novelist who also writes screenplays, TV shows, comics and journalism. Her books have been translated into 26 languages and have been optioned for film and TV.
Her awards include the Arthur C Clarke Award, the prestigious University of Johannesburg prize, the August Derleth Prize, the Strand Critics Choice Award and the RT Thriller of the Year. She’s been honoured in South Africa’s parliament and most recently won the Mbokondo Award from the Department of Arts and Culture, celebrating women in the arts for her work in the Creative Writing field.
She is the author of Broken Monsters, about art, ambition, damaged people and not-quite-broken cities, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer, the nature of violence, and how we are haunted by history, Zoo City, a phantasmagorical noir set in Johannesburg which won the Arthur C Clarke Award and Moxyland, a dystopian political thriller about a corporate apartheid state where people are controlled by their cell phones. Her first book was a feminist pop-history, Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past, which has recently been reprinted.
Her comics work includes Survivors' Club, an original Vertigo comic with Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly, the New York Times-bestselling graphic novel, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom with Inaki Miranda, and a Wonder Woman one-shot for kids, “The Trouble With Cats†in Sensation Comics, set in Mozambique and Soweto and drawn by Mike Maihack.
Her film and TV work includes directing the documentary, Glitterboys & Ganglands, about Cape Town’s biggest female impersonation beauty pageant. The film won best LGBT film at the San Diego Black Film Festival.
She was the showrunner on South Africa’s first full length animated TV series, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika which ran for 104 half hour episodes from 2006-2009 on SABC3. She’s also written for the Disney shows Mouk and Florrie’s Dragons and on the satirical political puppet show,ZANews and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s South African Story.
Before that she was a freelance journalist for eight years, writing about electricity cable thieves, TB, circumcision, telemedicine, great white sharks, homeless sex workers, Botswana’s first female high court judge, and Barbie as a feminist icon for magazines ranging from The Sunday Times Lifestyle to Nature Medicine, Colors, The Big Issue and Marie Claire.
She lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her daughter.
www.laurenbeukes.com
Twitter.com/laurenbeukes Instagram.com/laurenbeukes Facebook.com/laurenbeukes
Awards & Achievements
2015 South Africa’s Mbokondo Award for Women In The Arts: Creative Writing
2014 August Derleth Award for The Shining Girls
2014 Strand Critics Choice Award for The Shining Girls
2014 NPR Best Books of the Year Broken Monsters
2014 LA Times Best Books of the Year Broken Monsters
2013 University of Johannesburg Literature Prize for The Shining Girls
2013 RT Thriller of the Year for The Shining Girls
2013 WHSmith Richard & Judy BookClub Choice
2013 Exclusive Books’ Bookseller’s Choice for The Shining Girls
2013 Amazon Best Mysteries and Thrillers for The Shining Girls
2011 Kitschies Red Tentacle for Zoo City
2010 Arthur C Clarke Award for Zoo City
Find the best price forThe Shining Girls
Lauren Beukes
Goodreads rating: 
Paperback, Published in Aug 2013 by HARPER
ISBN10: 0007464584 | ISBN13: 9780007464586
Page count: 408
In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back. Working with an ex-homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby has to unravel an impossible mystery.
THE SHINING GIRLS is a masterful twist on the classic serial killer tale: a violent quantum leap featuring a memorable and appealing girl in pursuit of a deadly criminal.
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SocialBookCo User Reviews
Silke Wadskjaer Molgaard on 15 Oct 2016
“The Shining Girls tells the story of Kirby, a young woman living in 90'ies Chicago, who is determined to find the man who attempted murdering her and got away.
Harper is a killer roaming Chicago, searching for his Shining Girls, travelling through time and space to find the one that got away – Kirby Mazrachi.
As I mentioned above, I really liked this story. It was thrilling and suspenseful and Beukes' writing was great! I was especially impressed by her attention to detail, and the tremendous amount of research that must have went into her beautiful and lifelike descriptions of historical Chicago. I was sucked into the plot, and didn't doubt the time-travelling parts for a second, because her writing was so confident. I enjoyed how the plot jumped in time (Although I found it a bit confusing at first), and liked the complexity it added to the story. I also really liked how everything tied together in the end, and how there were limits to the House's ability to open into different times.
I loved how Harper's Shining Girls weren't just beautiful young girls, but intelligent and ambitious women, whose backgrounds were all interesting and inspiring – making the killings all the more tragic. Like the other Shining Girls, Kirby, our main character, was strong and independent, and I loved the witty dialogue between her and Dan (A character I also really liked - he might have been my favorite, actually).
However, this book is definitely not for everyone. There was a lot of very graphic violence, and Harper is by no means the sleek and polished killer we often see. There's no getting around that Harper is a gruesome and brutal character, and a lot of his actions were very disturbing. I can definitely understand why some people didn't enjoy reading from Harper's point of view.
All in all, though, I really liked this book! ”