Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 8 hours ago
In Conversation with Elise Juska
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 best-selling, 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.
Elise Juska is the author of the novel Reunion, named a New York Times Editors' Choice and forthcoming in paperback this May. Her previous novels include If We Had Known and The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and one of the Philadelphia Inquirer's best books of the year. Juska's short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, and many other publications. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.
The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.
Recorded April 15, 2025
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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.
In Conversation with Elise Juska
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 best-selling, 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.
Elise Juska is the author of the novel Reunion, named a New York Times Editors' Choice and forthcoming in paperback this May. Her previous novels include If We Had Known and The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and one of the Philadelphia Inquirer's best books of the year. Juska's short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, and many other publications. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.
The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.
Recorded April 15, 2025
Facebook: facebook.com/authorevents
Instagram: instagram.com/flpauthorevents
Twitter/X: https://x.com/authorevents
The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.
