"A mesmerizing, haunting story about the ruptures caused by family secrets and forced departures. A novel steeped in the complex history of German reunification, Restitution is a deeply moving examination of separation—across borders, generations, memories, and the Berlin Wall. Tamar Shapiro asks us to consider: What makes a family? How do we honor and atone for our lineage and legacy? What would we risk to hold onto our homelands? An intricate, piercing novel written by an astounding talent.”

- Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me.

“Rich, immersive, and intelligent, Restitution interrogates childhood memories with adult wisdom. It asks whether what’s broken—in us, our families, our nations—can ever be put back together again. It is gorgeous.”

- Julia Phillips, national bestselling author of Bear and Disappearing Earth

“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 descendants. 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.