Five-Star Stranger

An exciting and "inventive" (HuffPost) debut novel about a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app--a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or companion of any kind--who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.

Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? The father to your child?

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 as he navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients.

But, when an eccentric 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.

"A sharp page-turner about our culture's commodification of everything" (Debutiful), Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about isolation in a hyperconnected world, and "what it means to love and be loved" (Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans).

Author: Kat Tang
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 08/06/2024
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781668050149

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2024 pg. 1
Publishers Weekly 06/03/2024
Booklist 07/01/2024 pg. 23
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2024

About the Author
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 New York.