Five Star Billionaire - Softcover

Tash Aw

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007494165 ISBN 13: 9780007494163

Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd, 2013

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date :2013-02-28 Pages: 500 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK In the Man Booker prize-longlisted Five Star Billionaire Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers. forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.Justin is from a family of successful property developers. Phoebe has come to China buoyed with hope. but her dreams are shattered within hours as the job she has come for seems never to have existed. Gary is a successful pop artist. but his fans and marketing machine disappear after a bar-room brawl. Yinghui has businesses that are going well but must make decisions about her life. And then there is Walter. the shadowy billionaire. ruthless and manipulative. ultimately alone in the worldIn Five Star Billionaire. Tash Aw charts the weave of their journeys in the new China. counterpointing their adventures with the o...

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2013: In his ambitious third novel, Tash Aw draws a luminous portrait of four new, disparate arrivals to Shanghai: a venerable business woman, a pop star, a factory girl turned socialite, and an inheritor of his family real-estate, all of whose fates are tied to an elusive billionaire. But Five Star Billionaire is as much about people as it is about place: Shanghai represents the booming economic growth of China. It's a city of over 23 million people--some trying to make a name for themselves, others just trying to get by (for comparison sake, that's nearly three times as many people as New York City). By the end, Five Star Billionaire doesn't feel so foreign. The characters don't find personal fulfillment, but they're finally moving in the right direction. Aw reveals that the American Dream isn't so uniquely American as it is a byproduct of capitalism. Or perhaps it's a byproduct of the human condition: money becomes a way to quantify one's worth, to cure one's unhappiness. In such a big city, everything that matters is inward. --Kevin Nguyen

About the Author

Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, andbrought up in Malaysia. He moved to England in his teens andnow lives in London. He is the author of `The Harmony Silk Factory', which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and `Map of the Invisible World'. His most recent novel, `Five Star Billionaire', was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0007494165
• ISBN 13: 9780007494163
• Binding: Paperback