Description

Named a most-anticipated book of 2024 by the Sunday Times, Financial Times, Stylist, Vogue, NPR.org, Oprah Daily, Town & Country and more.

‘A moving story of how easily a life can be submerged by work, and what it takes to regain one’s soul’ Oliver Burkeman, bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

What are you willing to sacrifice to get to the top?

What it might take to break free and leave it all behind?

Carrie Sun can’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life.

At twenty-nine, she’s left her job, dropped out of an MBA program and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she can’t say no. Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder: she manages his work life, becomes his right hand and learns that money can solve nearly everything.

But amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one’s life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Private Equity is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice.

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‘A penetrating but all the more necessary critique of extreme wealth and toxic work culture as [Sun] questions what it really means to waste one’s life’ Oprah Daily, The Most Anticipated Books of 2024

‘Bound to fascinate and terrify titans of finance in equal measure. That’s because Sun writes of her own experience as the right hand to a billionaire banker, and shares incredible insights from the world that he inhabited, and in which she herself got lost. It’s an observant, fascinating look at a rarefied space of power and privilege that’s rarely on public view, and an unparalleled peek inside a system that shapes us all, whether we know it or not.’ Town & Country, Must-Read Books of Winter 2024

Publisher Review

Private Equity is an extraordinarily gripping and revelatory journey through a world we rarely get to glimpse, despite its influence on our lives. But it is also a moving story of how easily a life can be submerged by work, and what it takes to regain one's soul -- Oliver Burkeman, bestselling author of FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS: TIME MANAGEMENT FOR MORTALS Piercing and propulsive. Carrie Sun's examinations of this most rarefied stratum are nuanced and poignant. Private Equity is a young woman's reckoning, set at the summit of money and power that asks the most universal of questions: how much of ourselves do we owe our family and work and how do we find the courage to make our days our own? -- Stephanie Danler, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of SWEETBITTER Carrie Sun's nuanced and shocking memoir depicts a woman's rise in a high finance dystopia where an employee's life is never private and nothing is equitable. Private Equity is the account of years of leashed efficiency that left her a wild and breaking heart and, eventually, the courage to speak its bitter, unsparing truth -- Honor Moore, author of OUR REVOLUTION, A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER AT MIDCENTURY A fascinating memoir, tense and exciting, taking us inside a rarefied kingdom that, more than we'd like to admit, controls our lives. I highly recommend it -- Phillip Lopate