In 1990s Shanghai, fortunes are waiting to be made—but not everyone can be a winner. A sprawling cast of stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, bureaucrats, schemers, and dreamers ride the wave of market reform in the wake of the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s historic reopening. At the center is the daring self-made trader Ah Bao, whose increasingly risky maneuvers intertwine his fate with those of three women, each with her own ambitions. Luxuriating in Shanghai’s food, fashion, and language, the story unfolds as an exuberant love letter to the city—an intoxicating epic tinged with romanticism.