Review: Five Star Billionaire, By Tash Aw: The loneliness of five long-distance foreigners | The Independent

Shanghai Skyline (Photo credit: Keith Marshall)

“If the authorities in Shanghai ever want to ask a prize-winning writer to pen poetic phrases to attract visitors and investors to China's (and the world's) largest city, they would do best not to call Tash Aw. For this, his third novel, paints a dark picture of an endless metropolis to which many come to seek their fortunes but instead risk losing, or at the least deadening, their souls.

Like his first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2005) and his second, Map of the Invisible World, Five Star Billionaire is connected to Malaysia, where Aw grew up. And he 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; a warm, wonderful land, but one where many fortunes were made too quickly and which discarded much of its history carelessly in the rush to develop.”

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