A gripping memoir of one woman’s self-discovery inside a top Wall Street firm, and an urgent indictment of privilege, extreme wealth, and work culture

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

"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" - Stylist

"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" - Red

"A vivid account of a world of excess, power, admiration and status" - Spear's