The Book of Lost Names
by Kristin Harmel
Gallery Books, Simon & Schuster, 2020
Set mostly in France, this is the story of Eva Traube, a French Jew of Polish descent. The book starts in 2005 with the elderly Eva, a librarian in Winter Park, FL. She sees a photo of a book she hasn’t seen for 40 years, a book looted by the Nazis during WWII. What makes the book notable is an intriguing puzzle inside the book, one that Eva put there during her days as a forger for the French resistance. She heads to Berlin to claim the book.
Then we go back to 1942 and most of the book is devoted to Eva’s flight from Paris and her relocation to a French village in the mountains not far from the Swiss border where she works as a forger for the Resistance and meets the love of her life, Remy. She also forges new papers with false identities for Jewish children who are being smuggled across the Swiss border. Bus she doesn’t want the children’s real names lost to history, so she and Remy figure out a way to record the names using a code in a very old religious book, one no one would pick up just to read.
I don’t want to say much more except I loved this book. Fascinating story line, exciting and very emotional. Recommended for fans of WWII fiction and women’s fiction.
Linda McLaughlin
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Sounds interesting and I love the cover! Thanks for reviewing. 🙂
I like the cover, too, Lucy.
This sounds really good. Love the whole book and puzzle angle. And I love resistance stories. Will you read The Winemaker’s Wife now since you enjoyed this book so much? Thank you for reviewing!
It is really good. I haven’t purchased The Winemaker’s Wife yet.
I love the sound of this story. I’ll try to find it and read it. Thanks for recommending it!
I think you’ll like it, Phyllis.
I recall you recommending this book to me earlier, I think. I can see why. Nice review!
Nicely done! I like reading of heroic deeds.
Right now I am weary of books using WW 2 as a setting or focus but I will put it on my list and come back to it a little later. What would writers do without that war.