Restitution, an engaging debut novel by Tamar Shapiro, is a story of division and reunion, not only of a family but of a nation: Germany. The story is divided into seven parts with specific timeframes, the last of which is fittingly titled, “Reunification.” It opens with a prologue showing that a brother and sister’s 15-year estrangement is about to come to an end.

Kate and her husband, Darren, sit glumly on their front porch on a chilly November evening. They’ve just returned home from the hospital after Kate miscarried their baby. A concrete foundation lays on the side of the house where they’d planned to add a nursery. Now, it will become a nursery for weeds.

Darren finally goes inside and turns on the TV. He shouts for Kate to join him. The Berlin Wall has just fallen, a meaningful experience for them both, albeit for different reasons. Darren is a professor of German history, and Kate’s mother is German, so Kate spent many summers in West Germany at her grandparents’ inn. But the family was originally from East Germany. Perhaps now they can travel to the town — even the house — where Kate’s mother and her sister grew up.

Kate and her brother, Martin, were inseparable until their mother told her alcoholic husband that he must leave until he stopped drinking. Kate was sad, but Martin was devastated. He’d always worshipped his father and becomes an unhappy, secretive boy whom Kate doesn’t understand anymore. She is only 7, while he is 10 and therefore knows nearly everything. After several awkward visits to various rehab centers (their father keeps relapsing), the siblings lose track of him.

They continue their summer sojourns to their grandparents’ inn in Bodensee, where Martin transfers some of his neediness to Opa, his grandfather. Their mother is loving but somewhat austere. Kate observes that she has a real mother and a summer mother. Back home in Illinois, the real mother speaks in short English phrases, usually commands. The summer mother, however, chats nonstop with her family in German and even laughs from time to time.

As adults, Kate is a landscape designer and her brother a successful lawyer. Martin has grown into a prickly, sly individual who can be arrogant and greedy. After the Wall comes down, he decides that they’ll visit the original family house in the former East Germany and surreptitiously contacts a lawyer to help him reclaim the property. Kate is furious as she believes the couple who’ve lived in it for decades don’t deserve to lose their home, which they insist they purchased (land records are chaotic and incomplete).

Kate and Martin learn that Oma, their grandmother, escaped with her daughters from East Germany before the Wall went up. It was risky — given the already-authoritarian government in place — but doable, as she had a letter saying her mother was dying in Bodensee. Oma didn’t carry much luggage, to avoid suspicion, and so made it through. Opa was to follow shortly after. But it was five years before he suddenly turned up in the West. He’d stayed on in the house he built and brought in the current owner as a lodger. When Kate decides to do some sleuthing around these events, more revelations come to light.

Shapiro deftly weaves past and present as she reveals the secrets and betrayals that plague an Eastern Bloc society where every neighbor is a potential informer and any hint of dissent brings swift and harsh retribution. Secrets and betrayals beset Kate and Martin, too, as they play tit-for-tat in their ever-increasing distrust of one another.

After a fierce row in the German lawyer’s office, Kate cut ties with her brother:

“I walked out of the office before my legs could give out, leaving Martin behind hanging on to that window frame, no sign of guilt now, just rage swelling across his features overshadowing the face I knew so intimately, the one I had grown up with, fought with, played with, resented, and loved.”

Kate’s relationship with Darren took a hit after her miscarriage, but he remains patient and loving, allowing her to heal. He is a steadying influence on her throughout the present-day turmoil, and they now have a daughter who wants to meet Uncle Martin. Meanwhile, Kate and Martin’s mother, who has moved to Vermont, hands out snippets of information to each sibling in an effort to help them reconcile.

Martin’s private life is largely ignored in the narrative, while Kate’s is closely examined. Seeing something of his relationships and daily activities would’ve rounded out his character more effectively. As it is, the adult Martin is a two-dimensional stereotype of a greedy lawyer, at least until the end of the story. Perhaps Shapiro intended this as a way of emphasizing the void left by his father’s abandonment and Opa’s traumatizing death (Martin found the body).

When a final, shocking betrayal comes to light, Kate is left to wonder — as have so many before her — whether you can truly know even those you love most. Readers must discover for themselves whether Restitution provides an answer.

D.A. Spruzen is the author of the Sleuthing with Mortals series and The Blitz Business.