The Book of Lost Names, Kristin Harmel
The Book of Lost Names, Kristin Harmel
23 Rating(s)
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $12.99

The Book of Lost Names

Bestseller

Author: Kristin Harmel

Narrator: Madeleine Maby

Unabridged: 10 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/21/2020


Synopsis

“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.

About Kristin Harmel

Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels including The Forest of Vanishing StarsThe Book of Lost NamesThe Room on Rue Amélie, and The Sweetness of Forgetting. She is published in more than thirty languages and is the cofounder and cohost of the popular web series, Friends & Fiction. She lives in Orlando, Florida.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nicole on May 15, 2021

I have been looking forward to reading this book because the premise sounded interesting. A Jewish forger who helped forge the papers of Jewish children in France to send them to Switzerland. She also records their old names in a book called “the book of lost names”. I love WWII stories but I think......more

Goodreads review by Lindsay L on July 21, 2020

Happy Publication Day to The Book Of Lost Names! 3.5 stars. The tearful ending made me round up to 4 instead of down to 3. An eye-opening and informative, lighter WWII story. Eva and her mother are forced to flee their apartment in Paris after being added to the list of Jews in the round up. Before Eva......more

Goodreads review by Angela M on September 11, 2020

Holocaust stories are never easy to read and they shouldn’t be. While we never see the horrors of the death camps in this novel, we see the heartbreaking impact on so many, especially children, whose mothers and fathers were rounded up by the Nazis sent to those camps, killed there or before they ge......more

Goodreads review by Danielle on December 22, 2020

Everyone should just accept that any book from this time period is going to be gut wrenching. 💔 It is a horrific time in our world history, that should never be forgotten. This book had all those feels 😭😢🤧 I loved Eva and her tenacity and strength. She was such a strong character. The idea of there......more

Goodreads review by Holly on August 08, 2022

4.5 STARS My first by Kristin Harmel. I was hooked after a few chapters in and became immersed in the story of Eva Traube. Two timelines that bring everything together. It begins in 2005, when Eva reads a headline in the paper "Sixty Years After End of World War II, German Librarian Seeks to Reunite L......more