Tash Aw

A murderer's confession - devastating, unblinking, poignant, unforgettable - which reveals a story of class, education and the inescapable workings of destiny. Ah Hock is an ordinary, uneducated man born in a Malaysian fishing village and now trying to make his way in a country that promises riches and security to everyone, but delivers them only to a chosen few. With Asian society changing around him, like many he remains trapped in a world of poorly paid jobs that just about allow him to keep his head above water but ultimately lead him to murder a migrant worker from Bangladesh. In the tradition of Camus and Houellebecq, Ah Hock's vivid and compelling description of the years building up to this appalling act of violence - told over several days to a local journalist whose life has taken a different course - is a portrait of an outsider like no other, an anti-nostalgic view of human life and the ravages of hope. It is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers.

We, the Survivors

Dreaming of love and success in rapidly changing Shanghai, four individuals including a starry-eyed waitress, a wealthy developer's son, a pop artist and a poetry-loving activist confront unexpected realities in regional challenges, including a billionaire's complex business strategy. By the award-winning author of The Harmony Silk Factory.

A Novel

Five-star Billionaire

Running the area's most impressive Chinese silk factory in the Malaysian region throughout the first half of the twentieth century, admired war veteran Johnny Lim finds his life complicated by his son's belief that Johnny is a collaborator who uses the factory as a front for illegal businesses. A first novel. Reprint.

The Harmony Silk Factory

With his entry into Restless Book's The Face series, award-winning novelist Tash Aw explores the panoramic cultural vitality of modern Asia through his own complicated family story of migration and adaptation. From a taxi ride in present-day Bangkok, to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1980s Kuala Lumpur, to his grandfathers' treacherous boat journeys to mainland China in the 1920s, Aw weaves together stories of insiders and outsiders, images from rural villages to megacity nightclubs and voices in a dizzying variety of dialects and slangs.

Strangers on a Pier

The Face

'So wise and so well done. It made me wish it were much longer than it is' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie From the award-winning author of Five Star Billionaire and We, The Survivors comes a whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage.

Portrait of a Family

Originally published: Great Britain: Fourth Estate, 2009.

Map of the Invisible World

A mesmerising tale Both heartbreaking and joyful MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM A radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer about family desire and what we inherit from celebrated author Tash Aw Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate YIYUN LI CHOSEN AS A TIMES GUARDIAN and FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF 2025 When his grandfather dies a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair The trees are diseased the fields parched from months of drought Still Jay s father Jack sends him out to work the land or whatever land is left Over the course of these hot dense days Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan the son of the farm s manager different from him in every way except for one Out in the fields and on the streets into town the charge between the boys intensifies Inside the house the other family members confront their own regrets and begin to drift apart Like the land around them they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete At once sweeping and intimate The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide It is the first in a quartet of novels that form

The South

Running an impressive Chinese silk factory in the Malaysian region throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Johnny Lim finds his life complicated by his son's belief that he uses the factory as a front for illegal businesses.

In the Man Booker prize-longlisted ‘Five Star Billionaire’ Tash Aw charts the overlapping lives of migrant Malaysian workers, forging lives for themselves in sprawling Shanghai.

Five Star Billionaire

Een persoonlijke geschiedenis van een ontworteld leven In Vreemdelingen op een kade tekent schrijver Tash Aw een belangwekkend en inzichtelijk portret van het moderne Azië op aan de hand van de migratiegeschiedenis van zijn eigen familie. Zijn grootvader verliet in de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw het vasteland van China, op zoek naar een nieuw leven in Maleisië. Tash Aw beschrijft de jaren die volgden door vele verhalen te vervlechten tot één geheel. Dat verhaal voert van kansloze immigranten naar succesvolle machthebbers, van afgelegen dorpjes naar nachtclubs in megasteden. Uit een kakofonie van stemmen in vele talen en dialecten distilleert Aw een bijzonder knap en complex beeld van een deel van de wereld dat nog altijd gevangen lijkt tussen een snel naderende toekomst en een verleden dat men niet wil loslaten.

Een familiekroniek

Vreemdelingen op een kade

Parigi

"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 harboured a crush on Yinghui, who has reinvented herself from a poetry-loving, left-wing activist to a successful Shanghai businesswoman. She is about to make a deal with the shadowy figure of 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 novel's characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants. Five Star Billionaire, the dazzling kaleidoscopic new novel by the award-winning writer Tash Aw, offers rare insight into China today, with its constant transformations and its promise of possibility."--Penguin.ca.

a novel

Five star billionaire

James Lasdun

Joan Silber

Laura Furman

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories roam the world, from Nigeria to Venice, from an erupting volcano in Iceland to a brothel in the old Wild West. They feature a dazzling array of characters: a young American falling in love in Japan, a girl raised by snake-handling fundamentalists, an old man mourning his late wife, a fierce guard dog with a talent for escape. Accompanying the stories are the editor's introduction, essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list.

The O. Henry prize stories

een familiekroniek

From the author of the internationally acclaimed The Harmony Silk Factory comes an enthralling novel that evokes an exotic yet turbulent place and time—1960s Indonesia during President Sukarno’s drive to purge the country of its colonial past. A page-turning story, Map of the Invisible World follows the journeys of two brothers and an American woman who are indelibly marked by the past—and swept up in the tides of history.

Benvenuti a Shanghai: un luogo dove può succedere di tutto e dove tutti possono diventare qualcuno. Cinque nuovi arrivati sono in cerca di riscatto: Phoebe, che si costruisce una nuova identità fatta di false borse griffate, manuali di self-help e pose studiate con l’obiettivo di trovare un uomo ricco; Gary, giovanissima popstar con un’infanzia difficile alle spalle, catapultato dai miseri villaggi della Malesia rurale alle sterminate platee asiatiche; Justin CK Lim, figlio adottivo di una ricca famiglia di immobiliaristi malesi, incaricato di gestirne gli affari a Shanghai; Leong Yinghui, imprenditrice in ascesa la cui totale dedizione al lavoro nasconde la solitudine della vita privata; e infine Walter Chao, misterioso e accattivante uomo d’affari che è anche autore, sotto pseudonimo, del manualetto per diventare «miliardari a cinque stelle». Mentre le vite dei protagonisti s’intrecciano l’una con l’altra, sullo sfondo lussi sfrenati e architetture ardite convivono con miserie insostenibili, slum claustrofobici e nostalgiche vestigia di un passato in estinzione. Ne emerge il ritratto di una società inarrestabile, dove le vite e le carriere possono conoscere formidabili ascese e catastrofiche cadute nell’arco di pochi mesi, così come interi quartieri possono sparire dal giorno alla notte per lasciar spazio a futuristici grattacieli. Finalista al Man Booker Prize, Miliardario a cinque stelle è un romanzo dalle mille luci ambientato nel cuore pulsante dell’Asia contemporanea. «Ci troviamo di fronte a un grande scrittore». Doris Lessing «Aw è uno scrittore paziente ed elegante. La sua prosa agile e senza fronzoli ricorda quella di Kazuo Ishiguro. Uno scrittore da tenere d’occhio». «The New York Times» «Il signor Aw racconta in maniera meravigliosa il coraggio e il fascino cosmopolita della Shanghai di oggi... Aw non si è limitato a fare satira su un ambiente sociale; ha creato un cast di personaggi convincenti, tutti arrivati a Shanghai per rifarsi, eppure perseguitati dal passato... Un risultato davvero notevole». «The Wall Street Journal»

Miliardario a cinque stelle

‘So wise and so well done. It made me wish it were much longer than it is’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie From the award-winning author of Five Star Billionaire and We, The Survivors comes a whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage.

Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family

Mappa del mondo invisibile

Ah Hock is geboren in een vissersdorpje in Maleisië. Zonder enige scholing probeert hij via slechtbetaalde baantjes te overleven in een land waar rijkdom en veiligheid alleen gelden voor een kleine groep mensen. Terwijl globalisering en technologische vooruitgang het land en de samenleving drastisch veranderen, voelt Ah Hock zich gevangen in zijn armoedige en uitzichtloze situatie. Dan, opeens, schijnbaar vanuit het niets, vermoordt hij een immigrant uit Bangladesh. In de rijke traditie van Albert Camus en Aravind Adiga vormt de bekentenis van Ah Hock - opgetekend door een lokale journalist - een portret van een buitenstander zonder hoop of wroeging. Het is een confronterende kijk op de verwaarloosbare betekenis van een mensenleven in onze huidige wereld.

Wij, de overlevenden

From the the award-winning author of Five Star Billionaire and The Harmony Silk Factory comes a whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage. In The Face: Strangers on a Pier, acclaimed author Tash Aw explores the panoramic cultural vitality of modern Asia through his own complicated family story of migration and adaptation, which is reflected in his own face. From a taxi ride in present-day Bangkok, to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1980s Kuala Lumpur, to his grandfathers’ treacherous boat journeys to Malaysia from mainland China in the 1920s, Aw weaves together stories of insiders and outsiders, images from rural villages to megacity night clubs, and voices in a dizzying variety of languages, dialects, and slangs, to create an intricate and astoundingly vivid portrait of a place caught between the fast-approaching future and a past that won’t let go. “Mr. Aw is a patient writer, and an elegant one. His supple yet unshowy prose can resemble Kazuo Ishiguro's.… He's a writer to watch." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Tash Aw is an essential voice for the global world we live in today." —Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl “Aw is emerging as a master storyteller.' —The Times “Aw's prose can be powerful and mesmerising in its sense of place…and psychological acuity. Haunting and memorable.” —Maya Jaggi, The Guardian Born in Taipei to Malaysian parents, Tash Aw grew up in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Britain to attend university. He is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), Map of the Invisible World (2009), and Five Star Billionaire (2013), which have won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and twice been longlisted for the Man Booker prize; they have also been translated into twenty-three languages. His short fiction has won an O. Henry Prize and been published in A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, amongst others.

Tash Aw

About

Books

Join the club