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Private Equity

'A vivid account of a world of excess, power, admiration and status'

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Private Equity

By: Carrie Sun
Narrated by: Carrie Sun
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Bloomsbury presents Private Equity written and read by Carrie Sun.

A TIME MUST-READ FOR 2024

‘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 might it take to 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 – as the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder – she can’t say no.

But playing the game at the highest levels comes at a cost. Amid the ultimate winners in our winner-takes-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole, struggling for balance in a world of extremes: of efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune.

‘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©2023 Carrie Sun (P)2023 Penguin Random House LLC Business Professionals & Academics Workplace & Organisational Behavior Workplace Culture Money Hedge Fund Thought-Provoking Wall Street
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Critic reviews

A riveting memoir that pulls back the curtain on a world of extreme wealth . . . An insightful look at our relationship to work and what we sacrifice to get to the top
Gripping . . . Pacey and economically written, Private Equity brilliantly strips back the gloss, detailing Sun's own fast track to burnout while asking if our modern model of work is deeply flawed
A vivid account of a world of excess, power, admiration and status
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)
All stars
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So glad I persevered with this book. I loved the first few hours, and the story was gripping and scarily accurate of this world (I kept thinking how has she got away with writing so truthfully!)
I did struggle in the middle to keep my attention levels up but glad I came back to the book as some of the best and most poignant parts of her story are in the second half to the end. Thought provoking xx

Amazing and very accurate inside into this world

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Even though the story resonates with my similar experience, the plot itself is quite simple and with obvious ending. Shortly, it’s not the book you will remember.

Trivial book

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What a brilliant, sensitive and nuanced piece of writing. Superbly paced by the author/narrator. I’m in awe. 👏🏼

Brilliant.

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One of the most captivating memoirs I’ve ever read! Carrie made me feel every bit of emotion she felt through her writing. Absolutely loved!

Great book

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I am really sorry for I am going to be very negative about this book. I could summarise the entire book with "ehy look at me! I am smart and beautiful and rich and you don't, actually, nobody does deserve me". It is bad to the point of being cringe at times. The author may have a very high IQ but had 0 EQ and trashes a life and a job that most people could only dream of. Apart from that, the narrative style is amateurish and so very boring. I have no idea how she was able to get a deal with Penguin. But I can venture a guess that it was thanks to the very job and boss that she trashed in her book and the many people that she got to meet because of these. A true disappointment.

A truly disappointing read

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