Five Star Billionaire - Supernormal Reads

Paperback, 416 pages

Published July 29, 2014 by Random House.

ISBN:: 978-0-8129-8481-1

(1 review)

"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 harboured a crush on Yinghui, who has reinvented herself from a poetry-loving, left-wing activist to a successful Shanghai businesswoman. She is about to make a deal with the shadowy figure of Walter 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 to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel's characters, is constantly in flux …

"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 harboured a crush on Yinghui, who has reinvented herself from a poetry-loving, left-wing activist to a successful Shanghai businesswoman. She is about to make a deal with the shadowy figure of Walter 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 to Shanghai, 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, the dazzling kaleidoscopic new novel by the award-winning writer Tash Aw, offers rare insight into China today, with its constant transformations and its promise of possibility."--Penguin.ca.

6 editions

ralentina reviewed Five star billionaire by Tash Aw

About the rat race

4 stars

Set between Shanghai and Malaysia, Five Star Billionaire is made up by a series of intersecting stories, the lives of a generation of migrant workers from different social classes. Every character is struggling to be successful. Everyone fails, though often one is left thinking that that's for the best, because the price of success is loosing oneself. The book it's easy to read. It is about the generalised obsession with making money and appear successful, but it doesn't fall into the trap of being patronising, or of dividing the world into idealists and money-thirsty: everyone is caught up in the same system. This is what I appreciated the most about it.