Carrie Sun joined Tiger Global Management in the midst of the longest bull market in recent history. A graduate of M.I.T., she reported to the firm’s founder, Chase Coleman. Together, they worked in the nerve centre of Wall Street. This was capitalism in its most secretive, demanding form.

But the deeper Sun reaches into the time-starved, luxury-laden world of Tiger Global, the less she begins to recognise herself. An immigrant from China who grew up in the Midwest, she mostly knew a world of 24/7 striving in which success was best measured by status and access to capital. It takes playing the game at the very highest levels for Sun to recognise her determination to abandon the life others told her she should live.

Told by an ultimate insider-outsider, Private Equity is an expertly drawn portrait of our new Gilded Age: a rare, first-person look at the winners in our winners-take-all economy and the interlocking systems of money, misogyny and self-doubt.