Globalism at its finest; Tash Aw or born Aw Ta-Shi is a Chinese descendent hailing from Malaysia, birthed in 1972 at Taipei, raised in Kuala Lumpur, and settled down in London. He is the author of three critically acclaimed novels and several short stories. Tash the Dash's beguiling, suspenseful, and indescribable unmatched writings is as prominent and as his right cheeked mole. He is literary influenced by Joseph Conrad, Vladmir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Faulkner, and Gustave Flaubert.
I was bashfully awed to know that Tash Aw has a long-list of jobs he once held, a lawyer for four years among others.
Staying true to his Chinese roots, Aw's latest novel, Five Star Billionaire is plotted around five Chinese-Malaysians, descendants of migrant Chinese from China who are returning back to Motherland China to seek their fortune. Map of the Invisible World is a story about two thrice orphaned Indonesian brothers who re separated and trying to get through life's struggles set in the kaleidoscope of Malaysia and post Independent Indonesia. The Harmony Silk Factory shot his career as a novelist. The love story is set in Malaysia during World War II, love intertwines between various races for the love of a Chinese girl, Snow. This tale of tragedy will have you weeping and question why war was ever made good.
Tash Aw is currently working on short stories set in Malaysia.
His works are;
Novels;
- Five Star Billionaire ( 2nd July 2013)
- Map of the Invisible (28 December 2010)
- The Harmony Silk Factory (4th July 2005)
Short Stories;
- " To the City", Granta, 100 (Winter, 2007)
- "Sail", A Public Space, Issue 13, (Summer 2011)
- "Tian Huaiyi", McSweeney's 42 (December 2012)
Essays:
- "Look East, Look To The Future", Granta.com, 25th May 2012
- "My Hero, Rudy Hartono", The Gaurdian, 9 August 2013
The below summaries are credited to Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Tash-Aw/e/B001HPXPBI);
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND BOOKPAGE
An expansive, eye-opening novel that captures the vibrancy of China today
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 novel’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 novel 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 book is both poignant and comic, exotic and familiar, cutting-edge and classic, suspenseful and yet beautifully unhurried.
Praise for Five Star Billionaire
“Estimable . . . artful . . . 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.”—The New York Times
“In Five Star Billionaire, the Taiwanese-born, Malaysian writer Tash Aw chooses a refreshingly novel perspective. . . . Through five distinct Malaysian-Chinese voices, Mr. Aw wonderfully expresses the grit and cosmopolitan glamour of Shanghai today. . . . Mr. Aw has done more than merely satirize a social milieu; he has created a cast of compelling characters, all of whom have come to Shanghai to remake themselves, yet are haunted by their pasts in ways that they barely understand. . . . In Five Star Billionaire, Mr. Aw has achieved something remarkable.”—The Wall Street Journal
“[Aw’s] ever-spiraling web of connections is as improbable as it is entertaining, but he knits his various threads with an elegance . . . coupled with a photorealistic eye for the minutiae of urban life.”—The Boston Globe
“The ambition of the book perfectly reflects its subject. In one scene, we’re introduced to a ‘folk guitarist whose slangy lyrics spoke of urban migration and loneliness.’ Aw might be describing himself, except that his threnodies are set to sophisticated modern jazz.”—Pico Iyer, Time
“Goes beyond the bounds of the ordinary . . . [Aw] provides a richly drawn landscape of compelling characters, and a deep immersion in their lives. . . . Five Star Billionaire is a fiercely contemporary tale of tradition, modernity and the cost of progress.”—Ellah Allfrey, All Things Considered, NPR
“Aw has woven an impressive and contemporary human tapestry of a country that Western audiences would do well to better understand.”—The Daily Beast
From the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning The Harmony Silk Factory comes an enthralling new novel that evokes an exotic yet turbulent and often frightening time and place. Map of the Invisible World is the masterly, psychologically rich tale of three lives indelibly marked by the past—their own and Indonesia's.Sixteen-year-old Adam is an orphan three times over. He and his brother, Johan, were abandoned by their mother as children; then Adam watched as Johan was adopted and taken away by a wealthy couple; and now Adam is hiding because Karl, the man who raised him—and who is Dutch but long ago turned his back on the country of his ancestors—has been arrested by soldiers during Sukarno's drive to purge 1960s Indonesia of its colonial past.
All Adam has to guide him in his quest to find Karl are some old photos and letters, which send him to the colorful, dangerous capital, Jakarta, and to Margaret, an American whose own past is bound up with Karl's. Soon both have embarked on journeys of discovery that seem destined to turn tragic.
Woven hauntingly into this page-turning story is the voice of Johan, who is living a seemingly carefree, privileged life in Malaysia, but one that is careening out of control as he struggles to forget his long-ago betrayal of his helpless, trusting brother.
Map of the Invisible World confirms Tash Aw as one of the most exciting young voices on the international literary scene.
A landmark work of fiction from one of Britain's most exciting new writers: The Harmony Silk Factory is a devastating love story set against the turmoil of mid-twentieth century Malaysia. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman -- a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer -- whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page.
Tash Aw can be contacted via;
David Goodwin Associates
55 MonmouthSt, ondon WC2H 9DG
anna@davidgodwinassociates.co.uk
michelle.kane@harpercollins.co.uk
For enquiries in the USA, please contact
Alla Maslin
Random Hoouse, Spiegal & Grau
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
emaslin@randomhouse.com
Follow him on Twitter
@tash_aw
Works Cited;
http://www.tash-aw.com/
amazon.com
IndiaInk; The world's Largest Democracy. A Conversation with: Novelist Tash Aw by Neha Thirani Bagri
(http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/a-conversation-with-novelist-tash-aw/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0)
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