Book Review – Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw | Isabel Costello

“I’m struggling to think of more than two books I’ve read set in China and I suspect they’re the same two everyone else has read: Wild Swans (1991) by Jung Chang and Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) by Arthur Golden, both historical masterpieces, international bestsellers and published a good while ago.  So much about China has changed since then including global perceptions – it’s opened up considerably and far more Westerners have travelled there, but to me it was still a huge and incomprehensible place I knew very little about.   Last autumn I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of Five Star Billionaire precisely because it’s contemporary and forward-looking.  Its bluntly unromantic portrayal of life in Shanghai taps into an unprecedented level of interest, curiosity and even fear of what China is and will become – I didn’t hesitate to include it in my Fiction Hot Picks 2013.

Tash Aw’s literary credentials are impressive and likely to be further enhanced by the release of this high-profile third novel.  No doubt his cosmopolitan background has played a part:  born in Taipei, China, to Malaysian parents he was brought up in Malaysia, moved to England to study law at Cambridge and now lives in London.  The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) won The Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Prize for First Novel and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year.  A second novel, Map of the Invisible World followed in 2010.

Five Star Billionaire charts the fate of five economic migrants of Chinese Malaysian origin as they pursue their ambitions in Shanghai (already the world’s largest city with a population of ca. 23 million and predicted to reach 30 million by 2020).  Phoebe is young, naive and materialistic, hooked on self-help books one of which is the Five Star Billionaire of the title.  Gary is a popstar who has fatally tarnished his image at the height of his fame.  Yinghui is a businesswoman who has sacrificed a lot to get where she is; Walter is a bigshot entrepreneur who’s not what he seems and Justin is a property magnate whose professional and personal life are in ruins.”

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