Five Star Billionaire
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Narrated by:
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Robertson Dean
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By:
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Tash Aw
About this listen
Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job - but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn't exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family's real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the story's characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.
Five Star Billionaire is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic audiobook that offers rare insight into the booming world of Shanghai, a city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams. Bursting with energy, contradictions, and the promise of possibility, Tash Aw's remarkable new audiobook is both poignant and comic, exotic and familiar, cutting-edge and classic, suspenseful and yet beautifully unhurried.
©2013 Tash Aw (P)2013 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Three women linked by their blood, their dreams...and their sins. From Leningrad in the '70s to America and London in the present day, Kimberley Freeman's new novel follows the lives of two sisters, Lena and Natalia, and their cousin, Sofi, as they move away from Russia and all they have known. Despite promising to always take care of each other, a pact to meet every winter is shattered as their lives change and long-held resentments begin to surface. Can that resentment turn to hatred? To murder?
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It's just not the same without Caroline Lee
- By Maria on 12-04-17
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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Transmission
- By: Hari Kunzru
- Narrated by: Hari Kunzru
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Transmission, Hari Kunzru's new novel of love and lunacy, immigration and immunity, introduces a daydreaming Indian computer geek whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.
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Thoroughly Enjoyable
- By Don on 07-11-04
By: Hari Kunzru
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Hello from the Gillespies
- By: Monica McInerney
- Narrated by: Ulli Birvé
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past 33 years, Angela Gillespie has sent to friends and family around the world an end-of-the-year letter titled ‘Hello from the Gillespies’. It’s always been cheery and full of good news. This year, Angela surprises herself - she tells the truth....
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Engaging
- By mgn on 08-18-15
By: Monica McInerney
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Duet
- By: Kimberley Freeman
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From the London pop scene, to the opera stages of Europe; from a tiny Greek island, to a stifling manor house full of secrets and deceptions; from the sun-drenched Queensland coast, to the silent outback; Angela and Ellie are two women both looking for something. One in search of her identity and her memory; the other in search of the love that she had and lost; theirs is a duet whose last note will not be sung until the heart-stopping climax, when a shadow from the past returns to claim them both.
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Gosh that was a great story!
- By Anonymous User on 06-10-09
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The Brightest Star in the Sky
- A Novel
- By: Marian Keyes
- Narrated by: Caitriona Keyes
- Length: 17 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Brightest Star in the Sky follows seven neighbors whose lives become entangled when a sassy and prescient spirit pays a visit to their Dublin townhouse with the intent of changing at least one of their lives. But what will this metamorphosis be and who will the sprite choose?
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Terrible sound quality, worse narration
- By Jan on 02-23-10
By: Marian Keyes
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She Regrets Nothing
- A Novel
- By: Andrea Dunlop
- Narrated by: Rachel Dulude
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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When Laila Lawrence becomes an orphan at 23, the sudden loss unexpectedly introduces her to three glamorous cousins from New York who show up unannounced at her mother's funeral. The three siblings are scions of the wealthy family from which Laila's father had been estranged long before his own untimely demise 10 years before. Two years later, Laila has left behind her quiet life in Grosse Point, Michigan to move to New York City, landing her smack in the middle of her cousins' decadent world.
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Good Listen
- By Vallena on 02-19-18
By: Andrea Dunlop
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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A Spy by Nature
- A Novel
- By: Charles Cumming
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec Milius is young, smart, and ambitious. He also has a talent for deception. He is working in a dead-end job when a chance encounter leads him to MI6, the elite British Secret Intelligence Service, handing him an opportunity to play center stage in a dangerous game of espionage.
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I highly recommend this little gem
- By Chou Young on 02-14-08
By: Charles Cumming
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The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
- By: Katarina Bivald
- Narrated by: Fiona Hardingham, Lorelei King
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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It all began with a correspondence between two quite different women: 28-year-old Sara from Haninge, Sweden, and 65-year-old Amy from the small town of Broken Wheel, Iowa. After years of exchanging books, letters and thoughts on the meaning of literature and life, Sara, mousy, disheveled, who has never been anywhere in her life--has really lived only for her work in a beloved bookshop, which has just closed its doors for the last time--bravely decides to accept her unknown friend's invitation to visit. But when she arrives, she finds her house empty, the funeral guests just heading home. . .
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Disappointed - no depth & poor narration
- By Kelly on 01-28-16
By: Katarina Bivald
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Losing the Light
- A Novel
- By: Andrea Dunlop
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When 30-year-old Brooke Thompson unexpectedly runs into a man from her past, she's plunged headlong into memories she's long tried to forget about the year she spent in France following a disastrous affair with a professor.
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Right book for right time
- By Pamela G. on 08-06-18
By: Andrea Dunlop
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Corduroy Mansions
- A Novel
- By: Alexander McCall Smith
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In London’s Pimlico neighborhood lies a tenement described in architectural guides as “a building of no interest whatsoever.” But the residents of Corduroy Mansions—including a literary agent, a wine merchant, a thoroughly unpleasant member of Parliament, and a vegetarian dog—are a rather fascinating lot.
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Oedipus Snark, MP
- By connie on 04-25-12
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Russian Winter
- A Novel
- By: Daphne Kalotay
- Narrated by: Kathleen Gati
- Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In Russian Winter, the beautiful debut novel by critically acclaimed writer Daphne Kalotay, a famed ballerina’s jewelry auction in Boston reveals long-held secrets of love and family, friendship and rivalry, harkening back to Stalinist Russia. Called “tender, passionate, and moving” by Jenna Blum, the New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us, Russian Winter is a perfect choice for fans of the novels of Debra Dean (The Madonnas of Leningrad), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), and Ian McEwan (Atonement).
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Read this review; Sophisticated and wonderful!
- By Cookie on 01-15-12
By: Daphne Kalotay
What listeners say about Five Star Billionaire
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Brendan
- 08-07-16
Great flow
I did not expect to enough this book as much as I did. I did not quite like there ending but it reminded me of the Japanese style novels that don't really spoon feed an ending to you.
The narrator was very good. However, I do feel that he should have invested a little more time perfecting house pronunciation of colloquial Chinese and Malay words. There are many apps and websites that can assist IBM this age and time.
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- Karen Pettigrew
- 06-28-20
Loved loved this book
I love the characters, I could totally picture Shanghai, I remember Malaya in the 1960s when I was there for a couple of years. The Chinese characters seem true to life to me and from what I see Southeast Asia went through enormous change. There’s a cynicism in this book that’s pervasive but I presume it’s based on the realities of life for people in those rapidly changing countries. China Malaysia Singapore. My only criticism is that I felt the reader did not pronounce some of the names Correctly such as Kelantan, and Trengganu and a couple of other words... at least it seemed to me.
But over all, Listening to this book was an excellent experience. Tash Aw is a insightful observer of human motivation
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- posh1
- 07-12-14
Editor or Publisher maybe mentally ill writer
Would you try another book from Tash Aw and/or Robertson Dean?
No. It looks like the editor or publisher did a hatchet job on the story line. It was told so disjointed. Some good information, but inserted in the wrong place at times. Some one should have proofed the story line. It was poorly put together? The writer is unstable like Justin and Yum yum!
Has Five Star Billionaire turned you off from other books in this genre?
What genre? Historical, philosophical romance, really!
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Robertson Dean?
Dean was working with what was there. I would not have published this in the current state of continuity.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
There were some very valuable life lessons, but the story line did not flow. I had to replay it several time because I did not know what the dam subject line was.
Any additional comments?
Ah!
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1 person found this helpful