Five Star Billionaire (Aw) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Mr. Aw has an eye for status distinctions. There is some Edith Wharton, as well as some Tom Wolfe, in how he invests awareness of these distinctions with moral and financial peril. Five Star Billionaire…[is] a busy yet sophisticated portrait of life in one of the most populous cities on earth…Mr. Aw is a patient writer, and an elegant one…a writer to watch. He works high and low, and is as interesting to read on pop music as he is on finance or sibling rivalry.
Dwight Garner - 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.
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.
Boston Globe


Tash Aw’s brilliant new novel focuses on four Malaysian immigrants, all determinedly on the make.... The unputdownable story of how these lives interconnect and touch upon the billionaire of the title, a shadowy avenging angel, is played out against the noisy, glitzy backdrop of a society on the cusp between abandoning old values and embracing a lifestyle as flashy as its neon glow.
Daily Mail (UK)
 

Aw is a master storyteller and Five Star Billionaire can be read as The Way We Live Now for our times.... [It is a story] of lives lost and found, of the transience of material success and the courage required to hope and to trust again, to forgive oneself and to believe in the possibility of love.
Guardian (UK)


[Five Star Billionaire] aches with grieving humanity as it follows the crisscrossing ups and downs of five migrant characters trying to make their mark on contemporary Shanghai... Towering about them all is the theater of illusions that is the novel’s dominant character.... Sometimes it seems as if he has ingested every last detail of rising Asia’s latest glossy magazines, yet never lost sight of the emptiness in the models’ eyes or the wistfulness in the lonely readers’ hearts.... No one knows who anyone is—not even themselves—and when one character reveals himself as a (real) celebrity, he’s taken to be the most shameless fake of all.... Five Star Billionaire is hard to beat....
Pico Iyer - Time


Aw...follows five Malaysian immigrants in Shanghai as they try to realize the city’s dazzling promise.... These characters, whose lives intersect and overlap in the strangest of ways, create a portrait of an unforgiving city that “held its promises just out of your reach.” But like the characters, who are left confused and wanting more, one reaches the novel’s conclusion feeling disappointed.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) A literary victory.... Think of Aw’s third novel as an ingenious game called "How To Be a Billionaire."... The playing board is Shanghai, that twenty-first-century city of limitless possibility; the power broker is the epyonymous Five Star Billionaire. A quartet of players...are revealed one by one.... Aw moves fluidly between past and present, creating a multilayered narrative about chasing, catching, and sometimes losing elusive opportunities.(starred review)
Library Journal


Making it in Shanghai: Five immigrants find life challenging.... Character interaction is a relief from the long slabs of exposition. The only break has been the voice of Walter Chao, who addresses the reader directly. He has overcome poverty in Malaysia to become a successful businessman....but is he reliable or a con man?... The answer comes only at the very end, in one throwaway sentence, Aw having seemingly lost interest in his own handiwork.... A clunky novel.
Kirkus Reviews