A midnight phone call can mean one of three things: a wrong number, a robocall or a terrible emergency. When suburban Bostonian, Claire Litvak receives a phone call from someone at the American consulate in Shanghai, it’s of the third variety: her daughter Lindsey is in the hospital on life support after she was hit by a drunk driver.

The idea for Rabbit Moon occurred when Jennifer Haigh, who wasn’t what one would call a China writer and hadn’t written about China in any previous novel, spent three months in Shanghai on a writing fellowship in 2016.

This accident in Shanghai is not the Litvak family’s first experience with China; Lindsey’s younger sister Grace was adopted from an orphanage in Chongqing a decade earlier. And when Claire and husband Aaron were about to fly to China to adopt Grace, Aaron couldn’t get away due to a work commitment so their older daughter Lindsey went in his place. She took to Grace immediately and the two sisters developed an unbreakable bond.

The title of the novel not only comes from the Mid-Autumn Festival, but also because the sisters—a decade apart in age—often look to the moon to connect when they’re not in the same geographic location. In the beginning of the book, just before Lindsey is hit by a car, Grace is away at summer camp.

In Shanghai the moon is invisible, the sky lit by a billion electric bulbs. Lindsey can’t see the rabbit, but her little sister sees it for her. In a cabin in the New Hampshire woods, Grace creeps out of her bunk and peers out the window, looking for the rabbit moon.

Claire and Aaron’s marriage had fallen apart; after Lindsey is hospitalized in Shanghai and her parents make their way to China, Haigh flashes back to the family’s earlier years and to explain the trauma that drove Lindsey to drop out of college after two years and move to China with her boyfriend Zach to teach English. On a trip to Shanghai, her life will change forever.

They’d come to Shanghai for a long weekend, on the cheap: a last-minute flight on a bargain airline, bunk beds in a youth hostel. The trip had been Lindsey’s idea. After ten months in Beijing, her Chinese had improved dramatically. This had created a distance before her and Zach, who knew ten words of Mandarin before they arrived and now knew eleven or twelve. Exploring a new city would, she hoped, make him fall in love with China—another unlikelihood, but it seemed worth a try.

Zach breaks up with her on that weekend in Shanghai and Lindsey is faced with a rent back in Beijing she can’t afford on her own even if she takes on more English students. After a chance meeting moments after her breakup, Lindsey finds a job in Shanghai and never returns to Beijing.

While Haigh has captured Shanghai in a way that seems as if she knew it for more than three months, her story—part mystery, part psychological thriller—could have taken place anywhere in the world: all of her characters come together through chance meetings, a message that is universal.

Statistically speaking, every meeting is improbable. Doubters can test this theory at home. Track your movements for seventy or eighty years and express them mathematically, a series of points plotted on a graph. Repeat one hundred seven billion times, for each person who has ever drawn breath on Earth. The odds of any two paths intersecting are vanishingly slim.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.