“
A fascinating, heartrending page-turner that, like the real-life forgers who inspired the novel, should never be forgotten.” —Kristina McMorris, New York Times bestselling author of Sold on a Monday Inspired by an astonishing true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis in this “sweeping and magnificent” (Fiona Davis, bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue) historical novel from the #1 international bestselling author of The Winemaker’s Wife.Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the
New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than sixty years—a book she recognizes as
The Book of Lost Names.
The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but does she have the strength to revisit old memories?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in
The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.
An engaging and evocative novel reminiscent of
The Lost Girls of Paris and
The Alice Network,
The Book of Lost Names is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of bravery and love in the face of evil.
Eva Traube Abrams, a semiretired librarian in Florida, is at the returns desk one morning when her eyes lock on to a photograph in a newspaper nearby. She freezes; it's an image of a book she hasn't seen in sixty-five years--a book she recognizes as the Book of Lost Names. The accompanying article describes the looting of libraries across Europe by the Nazis during World War II--an experience Eva remembers all too well. As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Râemy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remmeber who they really are. The records they keep in the Book of Last Names will become even more vital when the Resistance cell they work with is betrayed and Râemy disappears. As the Germans close in, Eva records a last, vital message in the book. Decades later, does she have the strength to seek out its answer--and help reunite those lost during the war?
“Kristin Harmel writes with such insight and heart that her characters will stay with you long after you’ve finished her books.”
