Reader Score
79%
79% of readers
recommend this book
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 Jennifer Haigh's trademark psychological acuity, Rabbit Moon is a taut, suspenseful story about the ties of marriage that no divorce can sever, and the fabled red thread that pulls two sisters together across time and space. Haigh proves yet again that she is "an expertly nuanced storyteller...her work is gripping, real, and totally immersive" (New York Times).
Joanna Rakoff is a novelist and memoirist.
Each time a new Jennifer Haigh galley lands on my porch, I drop everything and begin reading... Wholly absorbed, breathlessly turning pages... Her latest, RABBIT MOON, was no different... I loved it and you should read it right now.
"Haigh’s narrative resembles a police procedural — one that prowls widely to disclose backstories and contexts. Its foremost strength, and Haigh’s steadiest skill, is to fully inhabit disparate minds, hopscotching among genders, ages, economic classes and cultures."