Five Star Billionaire
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- 8,49 €
Descrizione dell’editore
In the Man Booker prize-longlisted ‘Five Star Billionaire’ Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.
Justin is from a family of successful property developers. Phoebe has come to China buoyed with hope, but her dreams are shattered within hours as the job she has come for seems never to have existed. Gary is a successful pop artist, but his fans and marketing machine disappear after a bar-room brawl. Yinghui has businesses that are going well but must make decisions about her life. And then there is Walter, the shadowy billionaire, ruthless and manipulative, ultimately alone in the world.
In ‘Five Star Billionaire’, Tash Aw charts the weave of their journeys in the new China, counterpointing their adventures with the old life they have left behind in Malaysia. The result is a brilliant examination of the migrations that are shaping the new city experiences all over the world, and their effect on myriad individual lives.
Reviews
‘Aw's tale of five migrant workers carving out lives in a modernising Shanghai is the stuff of a hit TV miniseries … the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing’ Adam Mars-Jones, Observer
‘A brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
'A fascinating cast of characters … a panoramic, expertly detailed painting of contemporary Shanghai' Sunday Times
‘“Five Star Billionaire” opens with a bang, not a whimper … Aw is a master storyteller and “Five Star Billionaire” can be read as “The Way We Live Now” for our times’ Aminatta Forna, Guardian
‘[Aw] is unmatched at evoking the smells and sounds of the land and cityscapes, the figures of speech and shifting cultural mores of that finger-like peninsula that pokes into the South China Sea …Their tales are told chapter by chapter, the characters slowly drawing closer together like flotsam in a vortex, before the stunning finale …There is wit here, and plenty of acute observation and characterisation’ Independent on Sunday
‘A new kind of immigrant novel. One that takes place in our increasingly mutlipolar world and is …a challenge to the old narrative’ Sunday Telegraph
‘The five characters are distinct, and Aw manages to bring them together well … Aw brilliantly recreates the intonations and vocabulary of someone educated only in Chinese’ Independent
‘Highly topical, sharply observed but affecting portmanteau novel’ Independent, ‘Books of the Year’
‘A splendid achievement. The narrative … is brilliantly designed, a puzzle whose pieces click satisfyingly into place – Aw’s book could scarcely be bettered’ Independent on Sunday
‘Aw’s style – terse but tender, lightly ironic without being snide – is fresh, bracing and, above all, compassionate. His characters … form profound impressions on the reader. One simply cares deeply what happens to them, and this skilled writer never makes that an easy matter to predict’ Scotsman
About the author
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aw (Map of the Invisible World), in his third novel, follows five Malaysian immigrants in Shanghai as they try to realize the city's dazzling promise. Justin C.K. Lim has come to expand his family's Forbes-listed financial empire, while his old crush Yinghui, just nominated for a Businesswoman of the Year award, is haunted by her idealistic activist past. Phoebe, having grown up in a village that "was not a place for dreams or ambition," jumps at the chance to take over a friend's restaurant job in mainland China, but when she arrives, she discovers that the restaurant has been abandoned. Pop star Gary, after conquering Malaysia and Taiwan, comes to cement his idol status, only to find himself under siege by the tabloids. Walter Chao is a powerful billionaire whose charitable deeds are as mystifying as his charm. 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.
