Five Star Billionaire Paperback by Tash Aw

Product Details

• Publisher: Penguin Canada (2014-06-03)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 400 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780143187738
• Item Weight: 334.53 grams
• Dimensions: 7.92 x 5.16 x 0.9 cm

An entertaining, expansive, and eye-opening novel that captures the vibrance of China today, by a writer whose previous work has been called "mesmerizing," "haunting," "breathtaking," "mercilessly gripping," "seductive," and "luminous."

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.

About the Author

Born in Taipei to Malaysian parents, TASH AW grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Britain to attend university. He is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), Map of the Invisible World (2009), and Five Star Billionaire (2013), which have won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; they have also been translated into 23 languages. His short fiction has won an O. Henry Prize and been published in A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, amongst others.