The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open 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 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 will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?

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 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.

The story moves smoothly between the two times: 1940 France, and 2005 America. Eva is in her 80’s when she is drawn back to Europe in search of a part of her past.

Eva’s harrowing ordeal is only part of what drew me in, mostly because the reader knows that she survives. Mostly, I think it was the people of the Resistance, the brave men and women who take Eva in and make her one of their own. They may not be able to fight, but they do what they can to save lives.

Which was great, because Eva, well, she could be so indecisive, I felt like shaking her sometime. She would make a bad decision, regrets it, and then make the same decision again. Her harridan of a mother only makes things worse. I often that wished Eva had been left on her own. Perhaps then the story would have had a different ending. And speaking of endings. Sixty years, really? People change a lot in sixty years. And while I enjoyed the ending, it would have made more sense to me if it had only been ten or twenty.

Still, I did enjoy the book. I found Eva’s story engaging and enjoyed learning more about the French Resistance.




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76. The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel