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In Kat Tang's exciting and resonant debut, a "Rental Stranger"—a companion hired under various guises—walks the line between personal and professional in surprising new ways.
Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? Your husband?
In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or an extra mourner for a funeral. Referred to only as Stranger, the narrator navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients.
But, when a nosy patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past. Now, he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that shaped his life.
Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about the commodification of relationships in a gig economy, isolation in a hyperconnected world, and the risk of asking for what we want from those who cannot give. This is the story of a man who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.
"Provocative, self-assured…Tang plays deftly with the conventions of romantic comedy... A smart look at people-pleasing taken to its illogical extreme." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Tang's debut shines, marrying hurt and heart in a character readers will root for and connect with…In smooth and affecting prose, Tang draws a sharp portrait." —Booklist (starred review)
"Moving and offbeat... a memorable character study of a man hiding from himself." —Publishers Weekly
"Moving…Tang uses clean prose to bring complex characters to life. An emotional character study that doesn't rely on easy answers to complicated questions of identity, isolation, and familial love." —Library Journal
"Kat Tang's inventive debut novel perfectly captures what it feels like to be lonely and searching for human connection in our modern life of parasocial relationships and contractual experiences." —HuffPost
"A sharp page-turner about our culture's commodification of everything... equally a breezy and thought-provoking read." —Debutiful
"Five-Star Stranger is a five-star read. Kat Tang writes with care and clarity, perception and perfect comedic timing about what it means to love and be loved in our absurdist era of technology-induced isolation. I closed the book with an audible 'ahh' of satisfaction — not only entertained, but enchanted, and moved." —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
"A hilarious and touching meditation on our atomized age. It's rare for a book so profound to give so much pleasure, page by page." —Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
"A sly, sophisticated, and compulsively readable debut about a person who is paid to be invisible, to be anyone to everyone, and yet inadvertently finds himself. Five-Star Stranger is a satirical comedy that grapples with the modern-day anxieties of the online persona and gig economy, masterfully blended with a poignant, heartwarming story about human connection." —Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
This information about Five-Star Stranger was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kat Tang is a graduate of Columbia's MFA program where she taught as an Undergraduate Writing Fellow. Born in China, relocated to Japan, and raised in California, she is fascinated by how we make and fake human connection in a technologically evolving world. Her short stories and graphic narratives have appeared in Electric Literature, The Margins, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. She currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
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