The Book of Lost Names

I’m delighted to take part in the influencer campaign to spread the pub-week love for the paperback release of author Kristin Harmel’s The Book of Lost Names. 

Publisher: Gallery Books (May 25, 2021)

Language: English

Paperback: 416 pages

ISBN-10: 198213190X

ISBN-13: 978-1982131906

An instant New York Times bestseller and a Goodreads Choice Award finalist when it was published in hardcover last year, THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES—inspired by astonishing true stories from World War II—tells the tale of a young woman with a talent for forgery who helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis. 

The book has been called a "fascinating, heartrending page-turner" by Kristina McMorris and "sweeping and magnificent" by Fiona Davis. The Publishers Weekly starred review said: "This thoughtful work will touch readers with its testament to the endurance of hope." And who couldn't use a little hope right now?!

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.

Meet the Author: Kristin Harmel

Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling author of a dozen novels including The Book of Lost Names, The Winemaker’s Wife, The Room on Rue Amélie, and The Sweetness of Forgetting.

She is also the cofounder and cohost of the popular web series, Friends and Fiction. She lives in Orlando, Florida.

Thanks so much for stopping by today. I hope if you haven’t already check out this book, you’ll do so now. Doesn’t this sound like a heart-pounding story?