Rabbit Moon
By Jennifer Haigh
Little, Brown & Co., April 8, 2025
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
Praise for Mercy Street
A New Yorker, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Best Book of 2022
“Extraordinary… Wonderfully entertaining, boasting vivid characters whose company readers will find deeply rewarding and the devastatingly wry humor of their creator… I was gobsmacked.”
–Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls, in The New York Times Book Review
“A superb unsung novelist… For years Haigh has peered deep into the heart of lost America, sketching characters whose deep-seated deprivation binds them together. She’s not interested in destruction, but in what makes them human.”
–The New York Times
“Haigh boldly seeks out moral nuance, melding crystalline language to a topical story that twists and turns toward a stunning crescendo.”
–Oprah Daily
“Haigh deftly walks across the fault line of one of the most divisive issues of our age, revealing what all ideology refuses to recognize: an individual’s humanity.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Terrifically readable.” –Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Jennifer Haigh's first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. She went on to write the Bakerton trilogy, which traces the rise and fall of a Pennsylvania coal mining town: Baker Towers, winner of the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author; the short story collection News from Heaven, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN/New England Award in Fiction; and Heat and Light, named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Her Boston novels include The Condition, the story of a girl growing up with Turner’s Syndrome, and Faith, which explores the effects of the clergy sex abuse scandal on a local priest and his family. Her latest novel, Mercy Street—an intimate look at a Boston clinic on the front lines of the abortion wars—won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her next novel, Rabbit Moon, will be published in April 2025.
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