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. “Ms. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue
for major attention. Her work is gripping real and totally immersive akin to that of writers
as different as Richard Price Richard Ford and Richard Russo.” ― The New York Times
