"[Five Star Billionaire] follows the crisscrossing ups and downs of five migrant characters trying to make their mark on contemporary Shanghai.... Aw brings to its whirligig, cashed- up culture the hyperobservant eye and the sympathetic heart he displayed in The Harmony Silk Factory and Map of the Invisible World. 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
"Tash Aw's brilliant new novel focuses on four Malaysian immigrants, all determinedly on The unputdownable story of how these lives interconnect and touch upon the make. 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." -The Guardian (UK)
"An innovative novel of the twenty-first-century immigrant experience."-The Telegraph (UK)
"Engrossing... seductive." -The Observer (UK)
"Few people can write about a place with both the astute observation of an outsider and the deep understanding of an insider. When the place is Shanghai, and when that writer is Tash Aw, we get a novel that is as multifaceted as the city itself, in which stories of the old and the new, the rich and the poor, the dreaming and the disillusioned, are woven together by a master storyteller. Tash Aw is an essential voice for the global world we live in today.' -YIYUN LI, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
"A literary victory... Think of Aw's third novel as an ingenious game called 'How to Be a Billion- aire.' .... The playing board is Shanghai, that twenty-first-century city of limitless possibility. ...Aw moves fluidly between past and present, creating a multilayered narrative about chasing, catching, and sometimes losing elusive opportunities." -Library Journal (starred review)