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.
Jennifer Haigh is the author of seven bestselling, critically acclaimed works of fiction. Her first, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her latest, Mercy Street, was named a Best Book of 2022 by the New Yorker and won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A Guggenheim fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Boston.
Evening’s Moderator:
Amy Grace Loyd, author of the novels The Affairs of Others and The Pain of Pleasure.
Leave a Reply