Private Revolutions

A portrait of the country through four women who grew up there in the eighties and nineties - and refused to accept the life laid out for them. Activists, factory workers, pig farmers turned students: they provide incredible insight into the lives of ordinary Chinese people -- Best Books of 2024 * Sunday Times *
Brilliant, often tragic tales of life for women in modern China . . . It is Yang’s straightforward prose that makes Private Revolutions a compelling read . . . Private Revolutions could be a Netflix series, for family, violence and romance abound -- Mei Chin * Irish Times *
An engrossing new book that meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women . . . What sets the story told in Private Revolutions apart is the speed and magnitude of this upheaval, captured by Yang with palpable admiration for the women negotiating these seismic shifts one day at a time -- Mythili Rao, Book of the Day * Guardian *
A remarkable debut from a gifted author -- Patrick Maguire * Sunday Times, Books of the Year *
A story of an economic revolution and the price of it, one that Yang has chosen to tell by focusing on the individual stories of four remarkable women she has met . . . Yang knows how to tell a story and how to capture attention. Each of these interwoven tales is studded with fascinating details . . . We are absorbed and sometimes gripped. The picture that emerges is one of sheer grit -- Christina Patterson * Sunday Times *
The stories Yang tells are the fruit of a set of close relationships that would be difficult to achieve now in China’s changed mood. It is the tale of a unique time and an intimate picture of what it was like to live through, and learn to navigate, the storm -- Isabel Hilton * Observer *
Private Revolutions interweaves the stories of a quartet of women born in the wake of China’s Cultural Revolution, from Leiya, a garment factory worker in Shenzen, to Sam, a middle-class schoolgirl turned Maoist revolutionary. The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on * Vogue *
Written by one of the most sensitive and acute chroniclers of contemporary China working today, this is a beautiful, immersive, moving account of the country’s whirlwind transformations since the 1990s, told through the lives of four extraordinarily resilient and idealistic Chinese women -- Julia Lovell, author of 'Maoism' and 'The Opium War'
A revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change. A real eye-opener about life in contemporary China -- Peter Frankopan
This is a book of delights. Yuan Yang shows us the real China in all its complexity — the rich, detailed, often brutal life of the villages and cities. Anyone who wants to understand what China and the Chinese are like will find great pleasure, and sometimes pain, in reading it -- John Simpson
Acute and moving – a frank, unsparing, yet tender portrait of young women searching for happiness and purpose in a fast-shifting world -- Tania Branigan, author of 'Red Memory'
A powerful and sometimes heartbreaking picture of the making of modern China. Brilliant -- Tim Harford
Private Revolutions has the extraordinary, novelistic power to show how everyday lives on the other side of the world are actually lived that won Behind the Beautiful Forevers a Pulitzer . . . A landmark work -- Felix Martin
Through the eyes of a quartet of women who were born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, Yang provides a fascinating portrait of womanhood and society in a rapidly evolving - and increasingly repressive - global superpower -- Waterstones, Best Books of 2024
Riveting … A powerful snapshot of four young Chinese women attempting to assert control over the direction of their lives, escape the narrow confines of their patriarchal rural roots and make it in the big city * Michelle T. King, New York Times *
A moving work of reportage, whose scale toggles between the global and the personal * New York Times Book Review *