Five Star Billionaire - Hardcover

Aw, Tash

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812994345 ISBN 13: 9780812994346

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 2013

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE · NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR ANDBOOKPAGE

An expansive, eye-opening novel that captures the vibrancy of China today

Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job—but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn’t exist.Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush onYinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowyWalter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes toShanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.

Five Star Billionaire is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel that offers rare insight into the booming world of Shanghai, a city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams. Bursting with energy, contradictions, and the promise of possibility, Tash Aw’s remarkable new book is both poignant and comic, exotic and familiar, cutting-edge and classic, suspenseful and yet beautifully unhurried.

Praise for Five Star Billionaire

“Estimable . . . artful . . . Mr. Aw is a patient writer, and an elegant one. His supple yet unshowy prose can resemble Kazuo Ishiguro’s. . . . He’s a writer to watch.”—The New York Times

“In Five Star Billionaire, the Taiwanese-born, Malaysian writer Tash Aw chooses a refreshingly novel perspective. . . . Through five distinct Malaysian-Chinese voices, Mr. Aw wonderfully expresses the grit and cosmopolitan glamour of Shanghai today. . . . Mr. Aw has done more than merely satirize a social milieu; he has created a cast of compelling characters, all of whom have come to Shanghai to remake themselves, yet are haunted by their pasts in ways that they barely understand. . . . InFive Star Billionaire, Mr. Aw has achieved something remarkable.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[Aw’s] ever-spiraling web of connections is as improbable as it is entertaining, but he knits his various threads with an elegance . . . coupled with a photorealistic eye for the minutiae of urban life.”—The Boston Globe

“The ambition of the book perfectly reflects its subject. In one scene, we’re introduced to a ‘folk guitarist whose slangy lyrics spoke of urban migration and loneliness.’ Aw might be describing himself, except that his threnodies are set to sophisticated modern jazz.”—Pico Iyer, Time

“Goes beyond the bounds of the ordinary . . . [Aw] provides a richly drawn landscape of compelling characters, and a deep immersion in their lives. . . .Five Star Billionaire is a fiercely contemporary tale of tradition, modernity and the cost of progress.”—Ellah Allfrey, All Things Considered, NPR

“Aw has woven an impressive and contemporary human tapestry of a country that Western audiences would do well to better understand.”—The Daily Beast

About this title

Review:

‘Aw's tale of five migrant workers carving out lives in a modernising Shanghai is the stuff of a hit TV miniseries ... the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing’ Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

‘A brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

'A fascinating cast of characters ... a panoramic, expertly detailed painting of contemporary Shanghai' Sunday Times

‘“Five Star Billionaire” opens with a bang, not a whimper ... Aw is a master storyteller and “Five Star Billionaire” can be read as “The Way We Live Now” for our times’ Aminatta Forna, Guardian

‘[Aw] is unmatched at evoking the smells and sounds of the land and cityscapes, the figures of speech and shifting cultural mores of that finger-like peninsula that pokes into the South China Sea ...Their tales are told chapter by chapter, the characters slowly drawing closer together like flotsam in a vortex, before the stunning finale ...There is wit here, and plenty of acute observation and characterisation’ Independent on Sunday

‘A new kind of immigrant novel. One that takes place in our increasingly mutlipolar world and is ...a challenge to the old narrative’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The five characters are distinct, and Aw manages to bring them together well ... Aw brilliantly recreates the intonations and vocabulary of someone educated only in Chinese’ Independent

‘Highly topical, sharply observed but affecting portmanteau novel’ Independent, ‘Books of the Year’

‘A splendid achievement. The narrative ... is brilliantly designed, a puzzle whose pieces click satisfyingly into place – Aw’s book could scarcely be bettered’ Independent on Sunday

‘Aw’s style – terse but tender, lightly ironic without being snide – is fresh, bracing and, above all, compassionate. His characters ... form profound impressions on the reader. One simply cares deeply what happens to them, and this skilled writer never makes that an easy matter to predict’ Scotsman

About the Author:

Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, and brought up in Malaysia. He moved to England to attend university and now lives in London. He is the author ofThe Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread Award for First Novel and the Commonwealth Book Prize for best first novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, andMap of the Invisible World. His other awards include the inaugural M Literary fellowship in Shanghai and an O. Henry Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0812994345
• ISBN 13: 9780812994346
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 379