The Book of Lost Names

Starred review from May 11, 2020
Harmel (The Winemaker’s Wife) brilliantly imagines the life of a young Polish-French Jewish woman during the depths of WWII. In 2005, Eva Traube, 86, lives in Winter Park, Fla., and works at the library, where she reads a newspaper story about a man in Germany returning rare books looted by the Nazis to WWII survivors. The story includes a photo of a book that once belonged to her, prompting her to leave immediately for Berlin. Harmel then transitions back to 1940s France, when 23-year-old Eva and her mother escape the roundups in Paris and end up in the tiny town of Aurignon. Eva meets document forger Rémy Duchamp, who draws her into the Resistance; Remy trains Eva, and the two inevitably grow closer as they work to provide papers for those fleeing the Nazi regime. Eva and Rémy devise a method of recording the names of unaccompanied escaping children, coding each name in an old library book, which Eva saw in the newspaper story. Now in Berlin, Eva hopes to recover and decode the names, and learn the fate of Rémy. Harmel movingly illustrates Eva’s courage to risk her own life for others, and all of the characters are portrayed with realistic compassion. This thoughtful work will touch readers with its testament to the endurance of hope. Agent: Holly Root, Root Literary.

May 15, 2020
Octogenarian, Floridian, and part-time librarian Eva Traube Abrams is also a former member of the French Resistance during World War II. She specializes in forging official documents. Born in Paris to Polish immigrants, Eva is a free citizen until 1942, when the Nazis begin rounding up Jews and Eva's father is arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Swiftly employing her abilities to create new identities, Eva and her grieving mother flee to a small town in the Free Zone, where they hope to cross the border into Switzerland. But soon Eva's talent for forgery is discovered by an underground network of Catholic townspeople working to save Jewish children and they convince her to stay. Eva creates hundreds of false documents for safe passages before the Nazis discover their operation. Several of Harmel's previous historical novels, including The Winemaker's Wife (2019), illuminate heartbreakingly real but forgotten stories from World War II, blended with a dash of suspense and romance, and this does the same. Recommend to fans of romantic historical fiction, including All the Ways We Said Goodbye (2020).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)