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From the New York Times bestselling author of Mercy Street, a tense, propulsive family drama set in Shanghai, where a fractured American family faces its complicated past.
Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks' marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous "miracle city," they face troubling questions about Lindsey's life there, in which nothing is quite as it seems.
With her trademark psychological acuity, Jennifer Haigh delivers a taut, suspenseful story about family, secret lives, and the unbreakable bond between two sisters, the fabled red thread that ties them together across time and space.
What are you reading this week? (8/14/2025)
I just finished Culpable by Bruce Holsinger – a cautionary tale about the role of AI and autonomy in our society. Now I picked up Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh.
-Felecia_S
"A gripping novel of suspense, infused with great empathy." ―Library Journal (starred review)
"[E]ngrossing...A final section from Grace's perspective ties up loose ends a bit too conveniently, but for the most part, Haigh keeps this family drama firing on all cylinders, and she succeeds at capturing Shanghai's dizzying effect on her characters. Readers will be transported." —Publishers Weekly
"Capturing both the possibilities of reinvention and the scars carried from a traumatic past, Haigh's searing novel examines the interplay between choice and chance." ―Booklist
"Jennifer Haigh renders her characters and contemporary Shanghai with compelling richness and exhilarating precision. This taut, devastating novel about a young woman's dark fate—at once avoidable and inexorable—will remain with you long after you put it down." —Claire Messud
"Gripping, propulsive and entirely credible, Rabbit Moon succeeds in multiple dimensions and gets Shanghai right. Brava!" —Gish Jen, author of Thank you, Mr. Nixon
This information about Rabbit Moon was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
Jennifer Haigh is the author of the short-story collection News from Heaven and six bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, including Mrs. Kimble, Faith and Heat and Light, which was named a Best Book of 2016 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and NPR. Her books have won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and have been translated widely. She lives in New England.
Author Interview
Link to Jennifer Haigh's Website
Name Pronunciation
Jennifer Haigh: The h on the end is silent, so pronounced haig
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