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. Only Eva holds the answer, but does she have the strength to revisit old memories?Īs 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.Įva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times.

“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

Kristin harmel the book of lost names