A Sunday Times, Observer, Waterstones and BBC Highlight for 2024
'Beautiful, immersive . . . Told through the lives of four extraordinarily resilient and idealistic Chinese women' Julia Lovell
'A book of delights. Yuan Yang shows us the real China in all its complexity' John Simpson
'A revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change' Peter Frankopan
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