Tash Aw's Five-Star Billionaire takes readers inside the hopes, dreams and failures of five lost souls struggling to rise to the top amid the glitter of modern Shanghai.
Phoebe arrives to find her promised employer already out of business. Armed with self-help books and an indomitable spirit, she works to reinvent herself into someone attractive and sophisticated enough to compete with the thousands of other girls trying to land a career and a husband. Yinghui already has a fabulous career, despite her youth as a philosophical left-wing activist--but has she let her need for success turn her heart cold? Her ex-fiancé's brother, Justin, has yearned for Yinghui for years, but the pressure of saving his family's bankrupt property empire has left him cut off from his own life and desires. Pop star Gary is the object of every young girl's fantasies--including Phoebe's--but his meteoric rise from poverty to fame has shown him his own emptiness and sparked a downward spiral of dangerous behavior.
Walter Chao, the five-star billionaire, has links to all these characters. As time passes, fortunes soar and crumble as five lives collide, sometimes with disastrous results, sometimes with a near-miss reach for true intimacy in a society that packs people together physically but encourages emotional isolation.
Readers who prefer tidy endings may balk at the final fadeout, but it fits the story's theme of possibility and uncertainty. Not only does Aw provide Westerners a peek into Shanghai, he gives us a cross-section of a society all too similar to our own rat races and forces us to examine why we run in them at all. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager, Latah County Library District; blogger at Infinite Reads