Novelist Tamar Shapiro reading and discussion

 Author Tamar Shapiro will be at Davidson on Tuesday next week, Nov 4, to read from her new novel Restitution and to discuss the challenges of writing historical fiction. 
4:30 - 6:00 at the Carolina Inn. Reading, Q&A, discussion.

The novel:

Restitution. 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? 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?The author:Tamar Shapiro was raised in the United States and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC. Her first novel, Restitution, is being released in September 2025. Other writing has appeared in Poets & Writers (online), as well as Electric Literature and LitHub (both forthcoming). A former attorney and non-profit leader at Mpact, the Center for Community Progress, and the German Marshall Fund, Ms. Shapiro spent decades working on housing and community development policy in the U.S. She was a recipient of a McCloy Fellowship from the American Council on Germany to study vacant property policies in former East Germany and spent a year working on urban policy in Berlin as a Robert Bosch Foundation fellow. Ms. Shapiro attended Harvard Law School and is currently a 2026 MFA candidate in Fiction at Randolph College in Virginia. 

Tamar Shapiro’s visit to Davidson College is sponsored by the American Council on Germany and the departments of English and German Studies.