Private Revolutions

''As powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary'' VOGUE
''Private Revolutions could be a Netflix series, for family, violence and romance abound'' IRISH TIMES
''A portrait of China through four women who refused to accept the life laid out for them. Incredible'' SUNDAY TIMES
''A revelatory, moving and tender tale of hopes, fears and change'' PETER FRANKOPAN
*A Sunday Times, Observer & BBC Highlight for 2024*

This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, in a society about to change beyond recognition.

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.

About the Author

Yuan Yang was born in 1990 in China, where she lived with her grandparents for four years before her parents brought her to the UK. She returned to China as an adult, posted there as a correspondent for the Financial Times; after the mass expulsion of journalists from China in 2020, she was one of the few journalists writing in English left in the country. She moved back to the FT's London headquarters as their first China-Europe Correspondent, and in 2024 she was elected as the Labour MP for the new constituency of Earley and Woodley. She is the first ever Chinese-born MP in UK history. Private Revolutions is her first book.