Private Revolutions

Fascinating . . . A powerful, personal perspective on a country of almost unimaginable scale and significance

The Times, Best Paperbacks of 2025

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

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

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