Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

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