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.
Adept if patchy ... Haigh holds a steady narrative momentum as she bores into each character’s backstory ... Shanghai emerges as a character in its own right, frocked in vivid detail ... At times, though, Haigh’s descriptions feel desultory, random entries in a writer’s notebook ... It’s a solid book that doesn’t quite soar, but at its best it plumbs the elements that compose love.
The backstories of these and other complex and memorable characters are told, and the novel concludes with a glimpse into their futures ... A gripping novel of suspense, infused with great empathy.
Engrossing ... 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.
