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Private Revolutions

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What to expect

A Sunday Times, Observer and Waterstones Best Book of 2024
This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, dreaming of better futures.

It is about Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village. Still underage, she bluffs her way on to the factory floor. It is about June, who at fifteen sets what her family thinks is an impossible goal: to attend university rather than raise pigs. It is about Siyue, ranked second-to-bottom of her English class, who decides to prove her teachers wrong. And it is about Sam, who becomes convinced that the only way to change her country is to become an activist – even as the authorities slowly take her peers from the streets.

With unprecedented access to the lives, hopes, homes, dreams and diaries of four ordinary women over a period of six years, Private Revolutions gives a voice to those whose stories go untold. At a time of rising state censorship and suppression, it unearths the identity of modern Chinese society – and, through the telling, something of our own.

Critics Review

  • 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

    Sunday Times

  • 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

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