The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

*Disclosure of material connection- I received a copy of the book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for my honest thoughts. I was not required to write a positive review and all opinions stated are 100% my own. 

About the book-

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.

My thoughts-

Historical fiction will always be my favorite genre, particularly novels set during WWII. Just when I think there isn't a new angle to take for one of these stories, along comes The Book of Lost Names, a story about the resistance, and not just the resistance but the forgers making the documents for the resistance. I have read stories about couriers but never about the actual forgers. I can not imagine having to make the decision to help people you know are being wronged and putting your life on the line day after day to help them, but there were actual real life people who did that and I love reading stories like these because they always help me to remember that ordinary people did extraordinary things during a time when there were such abhorrent things going down every minute of every day. I loved this particular story for bringing to light the things the forgers had to do, and of course for the beautiful loved story of Remy and Eva. The Book of Lost Names is my absolute favorite WWII novel I have read probably since The Nightingale. I will be recommended it to everyone I know.