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Five Star Billionaire: A Novel
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Five Star Billionaire: A Novel
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Five Star Billionaire: A Novel
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Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND BOOKPAGE

Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.

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 on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy 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 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. . . . In Five 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
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 2, 2013
ISBN9780812994353
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Five Star Billionaire: A Novel
Author

Tash Aw

Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, and brought up in Malaysia. He moved to England in his teens and now 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.

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Reviews for Five Star Billionaire

Rating: 3.476190525396825 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

126 ratings38 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The premise of this book sounded interesting, but it didn't work for me. I didn't care about any of the five main characters. Actually, there are six main characters. Aw does a great job of making Shanghai a character, but a rather unsavory one. Although the way the stories comes together in the end is clever, the effect was somewhat muted by having guessed what one of the characters was up to. It is well-written, it just didn't capture my imagination.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Tash Aw’s new novel is a great story of five unique characters drawn to the vibrant city of Shanghai for fulfillment of their perceived destinies. They are all drawn by the idea of the Chinese city but are not fully prepared for the reality of the teeming metropolis. The five people, Phoebe, Gary, Justin, Yinghui, and Walter Chau, arrive in Shanghai independently but readers begin to see the connections between them as they pursue their dreams. Phoebe is a young worker from a rural area of Malasia. She works in factories and keeps her eyes open for opportunities to advance. She succeeds in earning enough money to move to Shanghai to take a new job. Gary is also from Malaysia, raised in a poor family like Phoebe. He is a singer taught by his mother, rises to stardom, and makes his move to the lucrative China music market via large venue concerts. Justin is the son of a wealthy real estate family in Malaysia, who travels to Shanghai to work on a real estate acquisition as a family “fixer” of business/political problems. Yinghui is the artistic daughter of a Malaysian low level government administrator involved in regulating business construction. She moves to Shanghai to develop a her own business of personal beauty. Walter Chao is a writer of self-help motivational books for people who want to develop and maintain successful professional work strategies. All of these characters make personal choices related to economic success, and the results are not predictable. Shanghai is a city that fundamentally changes people and forces them to make life changing decisions. The relationships of the five people are complex and reach varied levels of intimacy. They must decide to continue their determined paths to success or salvage some of their personal characteristics that they sacrificed by making commitments to the very challenging but potentially highly rewarding Shanghai society. Readers will connect emotionally with all 5 of the “Five Star Billionaires” because of their interesting character development and their realistic situations in Shanghai. The vibrant depiction of Shanghai is like Murakami’s description of Tokyo in his novels, 1Q84 and Norwegian Wood. Five Star Billionaire is one of my favorite novels of 2013 so far.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is set in modern-day China, and aside from a couple of mentions of internet pages being censored, it could be happening in any Western (and by that I mean capitalist) country. Forget all those communist stereotypes - Shanghai is clearly a modern-day hotbed of money making and entrepreneurship. The story follows five people, immigrants (all from Malaysia if I'm not mistaken), trying to make it big in China. The story is detailed, forensic in its analysis of some of the characters' back-stories, but the writing style is pleasantly readable and it never drags. At the end connections have been drawn between all the characters, and I was surprised by how little sympathy I had for most of them, compared with my attitude towards them at the beginning of the story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow, this was so good. The "billionaire" of this tale makes this a revenge story. But it's also a story of humans; the way humans make use of each other, the cruelty they're capable of. And those who want to be rich: stepping on each other to claw their way to the top. Dropping their souls through their feet as they go.
    I loved the author's depictions of The fast and furious society and Shanghai.

    Phoebe is a young woman from Malaysia, a northern rural village. She makes her way to Shanghai, with the promise of a place to stay and a job working with a friend of hers, who has been emailing her. When she gets there, she finds out the friend is just using her to get her to pay the rent, as she has been fired from her job.
    Phoebe gets a job through serendipity: just being in the right place at the right time. It all works out very well for her, and she studies self-help books in her quest to marry a rich man and succeed in getting the leisurely life she has always envisioned for herself.

    From Phoebe's secret journal:
    "do not let other people step on you.
    Sometimes Shanghai bore down on her with the weight of 10 skyscrapers. The people were so haughty; their dialect was harsh to her ears. If someone talked to her in their language, she would feel attacked just by the sound of it. She had to come here full of hope, but on some nights, even after she had deposited all her loathing and terror into her secret journal, she still felt that she was tumbling down, down, and there was no way up. It had been a mistake to gamble as she did."

    Justin and his brother were from the lim family. They had been filthy rich.Justin drops out of his role as fixer in the family. They would be celebrating New Year's.
    Maybe one of the many reasons the rich people in this story fall from their towering heights is because of what they consume.
    ".. in recent years the family had even taken to having the New Year's Eve dinner in a hotel -- a servants were getting old, his mother had said, and they simply couldn't trust getting a young Filipina or Indonesian maid (she'd heard such horror stories: family heirlooms being stolen, phone bills full of calls to manila, people being killed in their own homes). So the family would Book a private room in the Chinese restaurant of a fancy hotel, 12 of them sitting in near-silence around a big table laden with food that would remain half consumed at the end of the evening. How lucky we are to have a family like this, his father would say at the conclusion of the meal. he said that every single year Justin could remember. But those extravagant banquets of bird's nest and shark-fin soups, whole suckling pigs, the finest New Zealand abalone, and strange sea creatures he hadn't even recognized -- perhaps they were all in the past, now that his family was ruined. He wondered if they were having more modest celebrations, or if they were celebrating at all. He imagined bitter recriminations: mother blaming father, brother blaming mother, grandmother blaming Uncle -- for the loss of their fortune, for their loss of their eldest son."


    More of Phoebe's ruminations:
    "... It was a proper matchmaking website for professional people, expensive to join, so she was naturally more optimistic when men sent her messages on this site. Of course, she had long since learned that the appearance of classiness in Shanghai was no guarantee of truthfulness, and she treated all approaches from men with the same caution as she would when shopping for counterfeit luxury goods. China was full of CopyCat products and people. She was now experienced enough to tell from one simple message whether a man was serious or not, whether he was just looking for sex, whether he was a married man in search of a mistress, or if he was indeed in need of a future wife. She could tell if a man was lying about who he was, about his job and income, where he was from. She could tell if he was from Beijing or if he was a Pakistani pretending to be from beijing. All the scam marriage proposals from indian, nigerian, and Arab men -- she was aware of them all; she did not even know what they wanted from her, but she made sure she stayed clear of them. She had become expert in the courtship rituals of the internet; no one could trick her with flowery words or insincere promises. To phoebe, internet dating had become like a book written in a language that she had mastered, just as she had conquered the rocky path to employment in shanghai.
    ..Being open and honest with a man is like asking him to drive over you with a bulldozer!"

    And...:
    "Her books had been right: men wanted only what they couldn't obtain.
    She made the decision -- it was an easy one to make: she would use Walter for as long as she could; she had to be ruthless. She would accept the gifts of luxury handbags and Italian shoes and British raincoats and jewels from Hong kong. She would not only enjoy the fine dinners but also use the opportunity to learn about the Western countries he had visited. She would listen carefully to his stories about getting lost in Rome and his descriptions of the view from the Eiffel tower, and she would store them away for use one day, when she was at dinner with someone else, her true soulmate. She would accept all his offers of evenings at the Opera and ballet; she would use him to make herself better. Make use of as they would make use of you."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    While China has enjoyed double-digit economic growth for nearly two decades, set at an average rate of 10 - 11%, much of that development was centred in the cities, where it may have been closer to 17% growth overall. Particularly in the period 2003 - 2008, the Chinese economy went supernova. This tremendous boom created tremendous wealth, in a country with very loose legal contraints and hardly any regulation. The harsh reality is that China is governed by the rules of the jungle, and that to many people survival means survival of the fittest. China's ancient classic The Art of War means that one should not shun to take advantage of any means to achieve one's ends. Conceit, double-dealing and deceit are all part of the game. In some sense life in China resembles a computer game, not in vitual reality but in the flesh-and-blood.Shanghai is the commercial capital of China, and with its history of being a world capitalist city in the years leading up to the war, its creation a miracle on the scale of the rise of Hong Kong, created out of mud, the early Twenty-first century saw Shanghai arise again, like the Phoenix from its ashes, to engage in a wild dance with the dragon. It appears to be an excellent stage for a novel of greed and capitalism of the new century. In that sense, one might compare Five Star Billionaire by the Malaysian author Tash Aw with the novel of the 1990s, Money by Martin Amis. Unfortunately, Tash Aw as an author lacks the skill to pull it off.For a start, Five Star Billionaire has a weak structure. The story is told in alternating chapters on a rotation of five, as the plot or rather five plots are centred round five characters, each telling a story in turn. Five, maybe the five points of the Red Star, is too many, and the structure of the novel seems contrived, rigid and mechanical. None of the characters is fully developed, and although interactions between the characters are suggested, this more surprises the reader than anything, and the relations do not become transparent. The plot as a whole remains obscureThe story told for each of the characters consists of a roping together of all the cliches that are written about China in popular media in the world's newspapers the year around. The characters are charicatures lacking a human dimension, and as a result they remain two-dimensional card board figures.Being a Malaysian author, Tash Aw has created several characters who are Malaysian, and although there are many Malaysians of Chinese ethnic origin in Malaysia, the story's premise that they illegally immigrate into China and there compete with native Chinese employees seems implausable. Some of the characters in the novel speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin, and to engage the reader in this foreign-language environment, some words and exclamations are rendered into English. Now, in Mandarin this rarely poses a problem, but readers may wonder how aware either the author or his editor were of rendering "Hey" ("Hei") from supposedly Cantonese into English. Better not read that part aloud to prudish ears with an understanding of Cantonese!Although Five Star Billionaire seemed interesting and exciting during the first 80 pages, the story becomes cliche, mechanical, and ultimately boring. Perhaps it tells us more about Malaysians than about China.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved this book through the first three quarters. I liked that the different characters stories were starting to come together and the reader was going to find out how five different people were connected in the large city of Shanghai, China. This did not happen as this is a sad story of revenge. Revenge may be a great motive to move a plot though, in the case of this book it falls a little flat. The ending is not satisfactory and leaves the reader wondering what the purpose was anyway. The central character is an author writing how-to novels to make money to destroy a family who he believed stolehis father's life. When he meets the children of the two men who he believed took his fortune he takes theirs. He uses another character to destroy a would be partner's main business solely to exact revenge from when he was nineteen. This is a sad way to end what started out to be such a promising novel.The book is well-written and so it can have four stars. There are a few f-bombs so those who like zero swearing may e disappointed. Shanghai sounds like a brutal place to have grown up or to live in currently and for all these Malaysians it must have been quite a culture shock.Phoebe is a young girl following the advice in the self-help books of the author which will steal everyone's money although they may rebuild after the novel is over. I hope so because I would like to see a deeper ending than the one that I read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Tash Aw came to BCLT to speak. I'm always amazed by people who write in a language other than their native tongue.Started reading it before we left for Boston, finished it after we got back. Needed to run through the chapters afterwardsto piece together the characters and their relationships. Some were clear to me, others hard to recall. Enjoyed readingabout Asian mentality in viewing western 'lifestyles'. Good read, though a bit confusing at times for me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    his mystery is set in a childrens' group foster home near Oslo. The director has been killed and the focus seems to be on a troubled child who has disappeared. Those Norwegians are a caring and kind bunch of folks, so this is hardly a gritty crime novel, but is an enjoyable read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I loved Tash Aw's previous novel, "Map of the Invisible World", and I was eager to read this one given its backdrop: the big dreams and harsh reality of today's China. New wealth is being created, but it's being distributed more unevenly than ever before, and the author drills down into the experiences of a range of characters from all parts of the spectrum -- migrant workers, real estate developers -- to illustrate this.But... the narrative bogs down under its own weight. Before I was 100 pages into it, I felt as if I was slogging through waist-deep molasses. It's perhaps too ambitious: the pacing and tone certainly don't make it easy even for someone as curious as I about the topic to become immersed in the novel. I think it has taken me a record nine attempts to make it 300 pages into the book, and I'm not deriving much pleasure from the process. I think by now I've reached the point where I can write at least a basic review, but it can't be an enthusiastic one. There's a lot of repetition -- this is, by and large, a novel about disillusionment and ambition, with all the ugly underside that you'd expect -- and what was completely missing for me is the kind of energy that is palpable when you are actually in Shanghai, a kind of energy that somehow is twinned with the darkness behind the boom. So, reluctantly, this is going to end up as a 3 star read for me. I don't feel any real compulsion to finish it. In fact, if I were forced to choose between this and the dentist, I might choose the dentist, if only because he offers nitrous oxide.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Similar in theme to Great Expectations a desire for the riches in another world, the search for comfort most often leads to fantastic motivated characters.In a sense a metaphor and warning about what Asian Capitalism is leading towards I enjoyed the read!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've never thought of migrant workers in quite this way before. This is a modern world in which the new migrant workers in Asia are those young people leaving the small villages in the provinces and turning their hopes toward the lights in the big cities of China. And Shanghai is the biggest and brightest of all. Tash Aw's book centers around four young people and the author of a self-help book who end up in the dazzling lights of Shanghai, each with their own idea of success. What they didn't know was that "the city held its promises just out of your reach, waiting to see how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted, how long your were prepared to wait...The city was teasing you, testing your limits, using you. You arrived thinking you were going to use Shanghai to get what you wanted, and it would be some time before you realized that it was using you..." (257)I really wanted to like this book because my husband has been singing the praises of the new China for several years. Unfortunately, I didn't like what I saw through the eyes of these characters. They were willing to do whatever it took to achieve their particular goal even if it meant following someone else's idea of success through the pages of a self-help book. The chapter headings could have been bullet points in the book with titles such as "Reinvent Yourself" and "Pursue Gains, Forget Righteousness." The author, Walter Chao, took his own words to heart and was able to follow through on his game plan without remorse. Maybe the primary characters got what they deserved. Or maybe not. I didn't have enough sympathy for them to care all that much, but I do think that this is a book that begs to be discussed and would be a good choice for a book group.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Tash Aw is certainly ambitious in telling this involved tale of five Asian people who are either questing for or trying to maintain wealth in the contemporary Far East. It was well written and I was not bored in its 350 plus pages. However, my problem was that the story was all to familiar to me. In the past few years I have read about a dozen book written by third world authors and in about half of them the central theme is the quest for wealth. I know if you live in a place where you struggle to survive this would be very important to you but I just had the feeling while reading the book I had been there and done that. So, I recommend the book if this is not a concern and there are several interesting subplots so that aspect was nice.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoy Tash Aw's writing about SE Asia, and this book is no exception. Using the voices of 5 different people, one realizes the variety of life and expectations in Shanghai. The connection between the people is only through the quiet intervention of the Five Star Billionaire in the title.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't know much about Shanghai and have never visitied, so I was eager to read this novel. I love how Aw depicts the immediacy and vibrancy of the city. Some of the overlaps between the characters strained credibility, but I really enjoyed reading about these characters and their lives.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's amazing how spot on this novel is in the way Shanghai is portrayed. Tash Aw manages to make you feel like you're walking along those streets, lost in those crowds alongside Phoebe and Justin and everyone else. It is perhaps a little unbelievable how intertwined the characters' lives are, considering how huge Shanghai is, but it makes for a very interesting narrative.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw is a story that held my interest as it told of five individuals and their ambitions to succeed in the crowded, busy city of Shanghai. The rich individuals want to make even more money, and the poor individuals are avid to succeed and become rich as well as find love. I found the characters interesting but as the story wove back and forth and the people in the story sometimes changed their names, I was sometimes confused and had to backtrack to remind myself who I was now reading about. I got a view into the way of life in that part of the world. I found the final third of the book losing energy, and in the end, some stayed rich and some returned to their humble roots, but nobody was able to find the love they were seeking. For example, it would have been nice if Gary and Phoebe truly found each other.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Five Star Billionaire is a novel that interweaves story plots and takes you back and forth in time. It does so well, and makes for an intriguing story. As much as I really liked to really like the book, however, I feel that it falls short of the target. The story does not really lead anywhere - there's nothing that ties up the bag. I think, still, that this is a good read that does lure me to read the author's other works.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really wanted to like this, but it dragged. I know any time a book has multiple characters whose paths cross very briefly, it will be slow going in the beginning...but this never picked up.It's a story of 5 Malaysians, all from different walks of life, who are trying to create a fulfilling life in Shanghai. Each character exudes a sense of lonliness as none of them can communicate with those around them, yet they look to others and material things for happiness. They also are unaware of how their lives are intertwined. Aw kept having many of the characters pass each other or just miss what could be a dramatic moment/realization. Maybe it would have been to soap opera-ish to have the poor young girlfriend realize her boyfriend was dating her boss, the wealthy older, but not "polished" woman. But at least there would have been some excitement in the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    interesting story about people who come to Shanghai. from poor to rich, every one has issues to survive. who can you trust? if you cannot trust the poor because they want to be rich, yiu for sure can trust the rich, or can you?characters are meeting during their lives but only as a side effect. i liked that it did not feel forced. good flow.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Tash Aw's Five Stare Billionaire starts off slow, and perhaps is slow its entire length, but that deliberate pace only increases the depth of his characters. Set in Shanghai, Five Stare Billionaire follows five transplanted Malaysians as they navigate the Chinese economy. Each one, from the migrant worker to the apparent tycoon, is deeply tied into their past, and old pains that they cannot escape. With simple, biting prose and deep rich characterization, Aw lets us live the struggle of embracing change in a world that gives no favors. A very solid novel and a worthy expenditure of 300 pages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An intriguing window on modern Shanghai, a city where fortunes are made, and hearts sundered. By turns sardonic and tender, the author deftly weaves together the stories of dream seekers and plunderers, new money and old. A worthy book by a wise author.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was a bit difficult to get into. The beginning was a bit slow and I had a hard time staying interested. The story pick up pace slowly and steadily and bit by bit little pieces start to fall in place. A bit of butterfly effect going on in this story of five main characters trying to get ahead, get rich, famous, or just survive in Shanghai. There is so much disappointment and missed chances, it reads like real life and I guess I prefer my fiction to give me an escape from reality.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Shanghai is the star of the show in this novel by Tash Aw. It is glamorous, it is shabby. It is filled with successful people scrambling to get ahead while others lose all they have. Above all it is a city in constant change, and by the end of the novel, we learn it is a place to exact revenge against those who have broken the rules. The story of Shanghai is told through the lives of five main characters. First is Phoebe, a factory worker from Malaysia who seeks to experience what success feels like. Justin is the man his family is counting on to recover their lost fortunes. Business woman Yinghui is running from the shame of her past by becoming a success in an area where everyone expects her to fail. Finally Walter Chao weaves his way into their various lives in a mysterious and contradictory fashion.The author was quite skillful in his descriptions of these characters and how they were altered due to their changing circumstances. Also the ending was very clever and subtle showing how their stories were linked, but the novel did not always engage me successfully. It seemed to go on a little too long and I had a hard time sustaining interest in their lives. I do think readers who have enjoyed Aw's books in the past will probably want to read this one, and I am interested enough in his writing to want to read his other novels.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book, as a whole was interesting. Though to call it 'enjoyable' would be difficult because it is not the most uplifting work and the characters are all rather flawed (to such a point that empathy does not develop towards them). On the plus side, the characters are developed rather well and you get to know them...you just do not like them.The story itself, structure wise, was done quite well. But for the structure, I might have given it two stars. Upon first glance, it is a tale with many, many strands but when one pulls back ever so slightly, you see that the author has weaved quite a tight knit tapestry of characters. As to what happens, again, not the most exciting things occur but as the characters are interesting (though I did not care what happened to them) I was able to continue reading this book with ease.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sometimes books take you places with a force so real that you will think you have lived there. "Five Star Billionaire" is such a book. Through its characters you experience the incredible pace of change in Shanghai as the city grows with the new China. Yet Tash Aw takes an interesting spin in this novel: we see Shanghai not through the eyes of the locals, but rather through the eyes of ethnic Chinese from Malaysia who have come to Shanghai to hit it big. Just as the city is shedding its old, traditional housing for the shiny curtain of skyscrapers, so too the characters in this novel shed their old identities and morph into new persons better adapted to the high-powered environment of modern Shanghai:the shopgirl who pretends to own the spa, the real estate mogul who would rather be a rental agent, the liberal literary type who reinvents herself as a hard-charging business woman, and the singer who's about to hit it big but would rather sing traditional songs. And behind them all, like a puppet master: Walter Chao, the five-star billionaire. So the novel is a meditation on how plastic our personalities and identities are--just as Shanghai itself is changeable and ever changing. But is the novel readable? I must confess that it was slow going at first, in part because I had to adapt to the way the novel deals with each character. But like the city that changes ever faster, the novel picks up steam and you invest in the characters and you wait and watch with Chao. What is he up to? Why does he always seem like the cat that ate the canary? And how has he changed over the years? To anyone interested in experiencing Shanghai without using a passport, I recommend this novel. I hope you come to enjoy it as much as I did.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I guess I didn't really get this book. It was an easy and enjoyable enough read, and maybe it is just that I don't get the culture of Shanghai, which is possible. But it all seemed like a bunch of loose ends for me at the end. First, the book seemed like it was way longer than it needed to be - and then when it finally DID end, it didn't tie up any of the loose ends for me. I did love the place setting of Shanghai and learning about life in that city, but I wanted more from the characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    See APril 25, 2013 review NYRB Pankaj Mishra
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The premise of this book sounded interesting, but it didn't work for me. I didn't care about any of the five main characters. Actually, there are six main characters. Aw does a great job of making Shanghai a character, but a rather unsavory one. Although the way the stories comes together in the end is clever, the effect was somewhat muted by having guessed what one of the characters was up to. It is well-written, it just didn't capture my imagination.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This novel didn't really work for me. I thought that the basic premise was clever, and I found the early chapters appealing, but that initial appeal palled fairly quickly.The story takes the form of five narratives relating the experiences of separate Malaysian émigrés who have relocated to Shanghai. These five include:·a young woman struggling to make a life in the big city who thinks that her greatest chance for advancement lies in finding a wealthy man,;·a member of an immensely rich family which has made its wealth through selling insurance and is now looking to cash in on the property boom in Shanghai as it becomes increasingly westernised;·a successful pop star in his early twenties who, after having a meteoric career seems to have fallen foul of the tabloid papers that had previously eulogised his every act;·a successful businesswoman who has created an extensive commercial empire but worries that she has sacrificed her private life; and ·a personal development guru who has developed a life plan that can make the most unlikely candidate become a billionaire.Unfortunately, as the novel progresses each of these characters seemed to become more rather than less two-dimensional, and the plot simply seemed too contrived to be rally plausible.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I can’t seem to finish [Tash Aw]’s book, [Five Star Millionaire], an ER read. The writing is good, and I get interested in the characters while I’m reading it, but when I put it down it’s weeks before I pick it up again. Too bad, because I enjoyed [The Harmony silk factory]. 2.75 stars