A man in his seventies looks back at me, his snowy hair sparse and wispy, his eyes froglike behind bulbous glasses.
The world goes silent as I reach for the newspaper, my hand trembling nearly as much as it did the last time I held the book. It's staring out at me from a photograph in the New York Times, which someone has left open on the returns desk. The book I believed had vanished forever. The book I last laid eyes on more than six decades ago. It's a Saturday morning, and I'm midway through my shift at the Winter Park Public Library when I see it. 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.Īn 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. 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. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. Only Eva holds the answer-but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?Īs a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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