The Book of Lost Names

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, freezes when she recognizes a photograph of a book she has not seen in more than sixty years: The Book of Lost Names. The article describes Nazi looting of libraries during World War II and a coded eighteenth-century religious text now held in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, a code that only Eva can explain. As a graduate student in 1942, Eva fled Paris and found refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she and a handsome forger named Rémy forged identity documents for Jewish children and kept a record of their real names. Their resistance cell is betrayed and Rémy disappears, and Eva must decide whether she has the strength to revisit those memories.