In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
*Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, [Amy Bloom,](http://www.largeheartedboy.com/…
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Tamar Shapiro’s debut novelRestitution deftly explores how war and politics shape us as both families and individuals over generations.
Clare Beams wrote of the book:
“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.”
In her own words, here is Tamar Shapiro’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel***Restitution***:
I need to start with a confession. The prospect of pulling together a playlist for my novel, Restitution, initially stumped me. I always write in silence or, if not silence, then with the kind of coffee shop chatter and low music that fades fully into the background. My father is a pianist, and I grew up with music (largely classical) as foreground, a language to be listened to carefully, attentively, proactively. The minute I focus on music, I can no longer focus on anything else—including writing. So my first thought was: There’s absolutely no music I associate with process of writing Restitution! But then I took a deep breath and realized that I do have a playlist for the years during which I wrote Restitution—or, more accurately, for the place where I wrote the early drafts.
Restitution tells the story of Kate and Martin, German-American siblings who are faced with a difficult question after the fall of the Berlin Wall: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled in the 1950s? I started writing Restitution while living in Leipzig, a former East German city. I’d known Leipzig since the early 1990s when my parents first moved there. I visited them frequently back then and fell in love with the city. Then, in 2017, I moved there temporarily with my own family—my husband and our two kids.
My daughter and son were thirteen and nine at the time. Parents of pre-teens and teens will likely understand that much of the music we listened to during those years was their choice, not ours. And yet those songs have now become my songs too, songs that take me back to a time when so many dreams were coming true. Finally, I was living in Leipzig. Finally, my husband and kids were falling in love with this city I already loved. Finally, I had the time and space to write the novel I’d always wanted to write.
Here are some of the songs that take me back to those years.
Umbrella by Rihanna
We spent our first weeks in Leipzig living in a short-term apartment overlooking the Nikolaikirche, one of Leipzig’s two most famous churches. The apartment was perfect for those early days. Centrally located, bright and sunny, with the best possible view. Of course, the apartment only had that great view because it was on the top floor of the building, up six long flights of stairs. Every evening after dinner, our desire to stroll around town battled with our knowledge that we’d have to climb those six flights again to get back home. But the sound of happy chatter calling to us from the square below always won out. On one of those early nights, we happened upon a band playing in the main square. Five men incongruously dressed like babushkas in wildly printed dresses, aprons, and head scarfs tied under their chins. Two trumpets, a trombone, a tuba, and drums. A crowd had gathered, and we could see why—they were good! They were singing an oddly cheerful, incredibly catchy, instrumental arrangement of Rihanna’s Umbrella. That song became the anthem of our early days in Leipzig, and I return to that evening again and again in my mind to recapture the feeling of endless possibility.
Violin Concerto in E Minor by Felix Mendelssohn
Leipzig is a city of music. Classical music lovers know it as the city where J.S. Bach lived and worked for much of his life. Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann also lived there (as did Goethe, who called it a Little Paris, but that’s a digression from music back to writing). Music is the reason I got to know Leipzig in the first place. My parents moved there when my father took a position at the conservatory that was founded by Mendelssohn in 1843. A few streets away from the conservatory, there’s a little park, often filled with lounging students. Wide grassy steps, the front edge of each step marked by a long strip of stone, lead down to a daylighted canal. Large wooden boxes for sitting are scattered across the steps seemingly at random. This park is named after Mendelssohn, whose bust stands at one end. There’s no sign to indicate any connection between the composer and the wooden boxes, but it turns out the five stone edges of the steps represent the five lines of a musical staff, and the boxes are not placed randomly but represent the opening notes of Mendelssohn’s famous violin concerto. Anyone curious enough could easily find this information online, and yet, every time I perched on one of these wooden notes, it felt like a half-secret handshake. Yes, I know this music. Yes, I know this city. Yes, I belong here.
Shotgun by George Ezra
We didn’t own a car in Leipzig, and we rarely needed to drive anywhere. The city is compact, filled with parks, rivers and bike paths. When we did need to drive, we signed out a car from one of the half dozen car share locations within easy walking distance of our home. Many of my music memories from our time in Leipzig come from those occasional car rides. My son was discovering his love of music at that time, and while his pre-teen tastes didn’t always match mine (nor, he might say, his current preferences), his joy was endlessly infectious. I will never forget the way he sat in the backseat, his round face lit up under wild curls, eyes wide, and bellowed the words, “I could get used to this,” always exaggerating that upward hiccup on the word “used.” I’ve since learned that my son was not the only pre-teen fixated on this sing. In fact, there are countless posts and essays online by parents bemoaning their kids’ obsession with Shotgun. Still, there was no way to be in that car with my son and not be moved to sing along.
Lemon Tree by Fools Garden
One of the places we regularly drove to was my daughter’s soccer practice. Sure, she could have gotten there on the tram (like almost anywhere else in Leipzig), but my son had a soft spot for the Schnitzel and Pommes they served at the little clubhouse near the pitch, so her practices became family excursions. At Christmas, that same clubhouse hosted the team’s holiday party. It started off stilted. The other families had never been particularly social (certainly not by American standards). True, there was the obligatory circle of handshakes at the beginning of each practice, but then we all went our own way. So, there we were, standing around awkwardly, when Lemon Tree began to play. At the first notes, all the parents began to dance wildly, then the kids joined in. We linked arms and filled the tiny room with our singing. Soon after that evening, my daughter decided soccer was not her thing and left the team. We never did get to know the other parents better. Still, for me, Lemon Tree will always carry with it the feeling of breaking through, of connection. After all, as the song says, “isolation is not good for me.”
Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen
My daughter was more likely to listen to music in her room than in the car, so her playlists often reached us through a wooden door that closed with the kind of solid thwunk that all of us have come to associate with German doors—so different from the creaking doors with gaps underneath that we have in DC. Still, even the thwunk of a German door couldn’t keep us from hearing Don’t Stop Me Now (or sometimes Someone to Love). We had a ping pong table in Leipzig, which we stored in our covered (car-less ) parking spot. One evening, my daughter and her friends pulled the ping pong table out into the courtyard. I expected a tournament, but when I looked out the window, I saw them all using that table like a lounge chair, some draped across it, others perched on its edge, tiny speaker set up nearby playing Queen. I feared the table would collapse at any moment, but I said nothing. The scene was too lovely, the music too good. Like I said, I grew up with a classical pianist as a father, so my own childhood connection to popular music was erratic at best. But through my daughter, I rediscovered Queen with a vengeance.
I Got You (I Feel Good) by James Brown
Just months after arriving in Leipzig, we became regulars at the soccer stadium, which was only a ten-minute bike ride along the river from our home. That short trip always felt like a parade—hundreds of team-color-clad fans on bikes pedaling in the same direction. Once in the stadium, we soaked in the atmosphere—sausages, mustard, sparkling apple juice or beer, and 45,000 fans. After each home goal, all the local fans stood and swung their team scarves while James Brown’s I Got You (I Feel Good) blared through the speakers. I’m not sure James Brown would have appreciated this particular commercialization of his song, but it’s too late now. I will forever associate I Feel Good with the pure joy of those moments. At the end of the game, we’d find our bikes, join the parade again, and pedal toward home, gravel crunching under our tires. When I recently discovered that the team had changed its post-goal song, I felt strangely betrayed. It’s hard to imagine that we will never again sit in that stadium and roar “I feel good.”
Davidsbündlertänze by Robert Schumann
When we moved to Leipzig with only our suitcases, I had one urgent question: What to do about a piano? I’d never lived without one (or at least access to a practice room), and I didn’t want to start then. So, we decided to rent a piano, and in the quiet moments when I needed a break from my writing, I began working on Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze. Schumann’s music speaks to me in a way almost no other music does. If forced to choose a favorite piece, it would be his Fantasie in C. But I didn’t have the time to tackle a long piece like that. Besides, the Fantasie was probably beyond my abilities even in my best piano days. The Davidsbündlertänze were perfect— a set of beautiful pieces from which I could pick and choose. I only managed to learn a handful of them during those years in Leipzig, but one, in particular, sticks in my mind (and my fingers). It is labelled innig in German, which translates to heartfelt or intimate. We’ve been back in Washington, DC for a long time now, but whenever I want to be reminded of our Leipzig home—sunlight reflecting off the canal outside our windows, my feet soothed by the cold tile floor, the cut-out paper flowers I taped onto the walls as decoration —I sit down at the piano and play that dreamy piece.
(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman by Aretha Franklin
The night Aretha Franklin died, my husband and I sat on our balcony, looking out over the dark streets of our Leipzig neighborhood, listening to her music. We didn’t have outside speakers, so we were forced to use the tinny speaker on my phone. Still, the power and majesty of her voice came through loud and clear. We didn’t talk. We just listened. Respect, of course. Then Chain of Fools, I Never Loved a Man, and finally Natural Woman. We stayed on the balcony long after the last notes faded, and, for the first time since moving to Leipzig, I felt keenly aware of how far away we were from the U.S. Yet Aretha’s voice was more than powerful enough to bridge the distance.
**Bonus Track: Ein Tag, Den Du Magst by Lisa Bassenge
I only discovered the music of Lisa Bassenge, a singer/songwriter from Berlin, after we moved back to Washington, DC. She si ngs in both German and English, but I find that I miss the German language these days, so I gravitate toward her German songs. One of my favorites is Ein Tag, Den Du Magst (A Day That You Like). The lyrics capture the magic of walking through a city, and the sense of belonging that a beautiful moment can inspire. She paints a vivid picture of shimmering asphalt steaming in the sun after a rain, then sings (as translated by me): “This is the kind of morning that only exists once in a thousand years / And this day will be a day that you like.” I happened to be listening to this song one morning in late 2023, while on the way back from dropping my son at school. Just a few hours later, I received the news that Restitution would be published. The day was indeed a day that I liked!
Tamar Shapiro’s debut novel, Restitution, was published in September 2025 and named one of the 49 Must-Read Books of Fall 2025 by Town and Country Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in Poets and Writers, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub. A former housing attorney and non-profit leader, Shapiro is a 2026 MFA candidate at Randolph College in Virginia. She grew up in both the U.S. and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC