'Private Equity' Is One of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

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Fresh off a breakup and in search of a job that would finance creative writing classes, Carrie Sun took a position as the personal assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder—though she wasn’t allowed to call her place of work a “hedge fund” while there, because her boss thought the name had negative connotations. The joys of Sun’s memoir lie in the absurdity of her tasks: coaxing a famous athlete to a company party, sourcing Mitt Romney’s phone number on a deadline, coordinating private-jet departures. The world of privilege she conjures is easy enough to envision—we’ve gobbled it up on TV shows like Succession and Industry. What stretches credulity is the naivete of Sun, who had previously worked another high-pressure finance job. Not only does she believe her boss is compounding his billions for the betterment of the world (spoiler alert: she is eventually disabused of this notion), but she also calculates she’ll have plenty of time to take classes and write on the side. Surely the fact that she had to endure 14 interviews before she was hired should have signaled that her workaholic boss would eat up her weekends. But as Sun reckons with her error in judgment, she also begins to reexamine other aspects of her life that she has previously looked upon with rose-colored glasses—a fraught relationship with immigrant parents, experiences with harassment at past jobs, a broken engagement with a toxic ex. It’s these personal revelations that elevate the book above a typical tell-all.

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Write to Eliana Dockterman at eliana.dockterman@time.com.