As children in Central Illinois, Kate and Martin were never told much about their mother’s childhood in East Germany. And they rarely asked questions. They were too busy grappling with the heartache left behind by an absent father and the tough love of a mother forced to raise them alone in a country not her own. Decades later, when the Berlin Wall falls, Kate and Martin are faced with a difficult decision: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled in the 1950s? They travel to their grandparents’ hometown and meet the couple now living in the house. But a house is never just a house, and the family secrets they discover reopen old wounds, driving the siblings apart just as divided Germany is coming together. Against the backdrop of German reunification, Restitution asks urgent questions that resonate today. What remains when people leave entire lives behind? What happens when personal histories are erased? And what—if anything—can heal these wounds?

Praise for Restitution

“A deeply felt, beautifully crafted exploration of the ways a family can lose and find each other. Restitution’s events are as vast in scope as the division and reunification of Germany, and as particular and human as the struggles and misunderstandings between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child; Shapiro is at home in all registers. Deft, wildly intelligent, and moving--a marvelous debut from a writer at the start of what’s sure to be a thrilling career.”

—Clare Beams, author of The Garden and The Illness Lesson

“I have rarely encountered a debut novel as potent, moving, and assured as Restitution. Tamar Shapiro twines the past and present, the political and the personal, into a story of tantalizing secrets. How much do we know about the people who raised us? To what extent are we defined by the legacies of family, culture, and country? Is it necessary—or even possible—to atone for the sins of our ancestors? Restitution is a book that lingers in the mind, asking important questions and resisting easy answers. Shapiro is a marvel.”

—Abby Geni, author of The Body Farm, The Wildlands, and The Lightkeepers

“Tender and deeply-wrought, Restitution is about all the ways war and political division splinter countries and families, but also how they can fracture a person’s spirit. Shapiro takes us into the years immediately following WWII in Germany, through division and reunification, and the ways these shattering events are carried through the lives of ordinary citizens and their descendents. In her nimble hands the story she weaves is hauntingly personal and universal.”

—Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower

“The year is 1989. The Wall has fallen, and Germany is in the throes of reunification. Kate and Martin, American siblings whose grandparents fled East Germany in the 1950s, now face a dilemma—ought they attempt to reclaim the family home they never knew? And what does that mean for the other family that has lived there for decades? Powerfully intertwining the personal and the political, Tamar Shapiro’s debut tracks a family that begins to fracture under the weight of secrets, betrayals and resentments. Restitution is an elegiac reminder of how our lives play out against the backdrop of the past and are shaped by forces larger than our own.”

—Susan Coll, author of Real Life and Other Fictions and former president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation