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