Five-Star Stranger: A Novel

Written by Kat Tang

Narrated by Julian Cihi

An exciting and “inventive” (HuffPost) debut novel about a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or companion of any kind—who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.

Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? The father to your child?

In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app as he navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients.

But, when an eccentric patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past. Now, he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that shaped his life.

“A sharp page-turner about our culture’s commodification of everything” (Debutiful), Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about isolation in a hyperconnected world, and “what it means to love and be loved” (Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Aug 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781797175454

Kat Tang

Kat Tang is a graduate of Columbia’s MFA program where she taught as an Undergraduate Writing Fellow. Born in China, relocated to Japan, and raised in California, she is fascinated by how we make and fake human connection in a technologically evolving world. Her short stories and graphic narratives have appeared in Electric Literature, The Margins, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York.

Reviews for Five-Star Stranger

[Vilasini N · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lovey book. Honest and deep. Loved listening to it !

[thegypseeshoppe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent story! All the feels! I absolutely loved the entire thing from beginning to end.

[Leslie Hitchcock · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The idea of this book sounded good, but it just wasn’t