Tamar Shapiro's Restitution delves into secrets, exile, and reunification in a family story about late 20th-century German history

For most of 1989, my husband was living in Germany, working for a private company after years of being stationed with the military there. He returned home to the US two days before the Berlin Wall came down. “I missed it by that much,” he told me, imagining the wild party that spilled through the streets. There had been obvious rumblings of political change earlier, but nobody knew exactly when it would happen.

For those whose lives it touched, November 9, 1989, has become a day of flashbulb memories, one marking the beginning of the Iron Curtain’s dismantling – a time of elation and the celebration of freedom. For the family at the center of Tamar Shapiro’s gripping debut Restitution, whose Oma and Opa (grandmother and grandfather) had fled East Germany for the West in the '50s, the date is indeed joyful, as well as devastating for more personal reasons.

The countries’ reintegration also brings complications for these people, and the novel kept me following how and why they arose.

The story is narrated by Kate Porter beginning in 2005, as she and her husband and daughter travel from central Illinois to New England to visit her brother, Martin, after fifteen years’ estrangement. In addition to the time around reunification, he recalls the childhood summers they'd spent at their grandparents’ home at the Bodensee (Lake Constance); the shock of their Opa’s death in ’73; and a visit to a lawyer in 1991 that led to the siblings’ long mutual silence. Another splintering in a family with a long history of separations and secrets.

In July 1990, with the borders reopened, the family members decide to return to Grimma, the former East German town where their late grandparents had lived. Their Opa was a natural storyteller, but none of his stories, oddly, involved their original home. Which, as they learn after they arrive, has been occupied by a middle-aged couple, Greta Schultz and her brusque husband, Klaus, for decades.

Afterward, Martin lets them know there are procedures for them to possibly reclaim their long-lost property. Should they?

About half the novel takes place in the 1970s and prior, between Kate’s memories and the recollections of her mother and aunt. The clear prose is unshowy yet thoughtfully worded. The many shifts in timeframe are handled smoothly, although there are so many that whenever I had to take a break from reading, I needed to re-orient myself by checking the year(s) at the start of each chapter. The German settings are so precise, also, that I wondered why the Porters’ Illinois home city went unnamed. (Based on landmarks familiar to me, they’re from the Champaign area.)

Fateful decisions lead to terrible secrets, and how and why they’re kept – and later revealed – says much about these characters. Kate and Martin’s sibling relationship, especially how patterns formed in childhood can be either nostalgic or vexing, feels honest and at times painfully real. Like Kate, I often found Martin irritating, but he became more understandable with greater context.

Anyone who enjoys interlocking mysteries mixed with family dynamics and history’s impact on individuals – both visible and not – will find much worth pondering. Restitution is a moving chronicle of the reverberation of choices over time, and of the importance of recognizing the past while reuniting divided countries and divided lives.

Restitution will be published next week by Regal House; I read it from a NetGalley copy.