Five-Star Stranger — Kat Tang

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 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.

“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).