The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication date:  July 21st 2020
Pages: 400

Florida, present time; retired librarian Eva Traube Abrams is at work organizing books in the library when her eye falls on a picture in an open lying magazine at a table. The article in the magazine is about how the Nazi's looted libraries during the war. She recognizes the book in the picture immediately; it is the Book of Lost Names, and the magazine is busy with a 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?

Paris 1942; Graduate student Eva Traube has to flee Paris because she and her parents are Jewish. When her dad is taken away, Eva and her mom flee undercover and with secret identity cards to a small French town, Aurignon, in the Free Zone, where she and her mom find a hidden refuge in a local auberge, hosted by a woman from the resistance, which is led from a local church and the church vicar seems at the head of it There Eva starts to work for the resistance too, forging false identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland.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. And then she stumbles on a meeting in the church between the vicar and someone in a nazi suit, could he be the one secretly betraying them? Eva tries to find out in the dangerous and thrilling last part of the book where she also has to try to secretly move a group of Jewish children to the Swiss border by train travel..

Wow, what an amazing, moving and gripping read this is! The story is a rollercoaster of a page turner, there isn't just any boring moment in the book, as the main character(s) are living in a scary time and place, where they have to do dangerous things undercover, but can be found out every moment. Luckily though the resistance work of the cell in Aurignon can work unnoticed by the Nazi's for a long time and save many Jewish children's lives. The unfolding of the betraying was so heartbreaking, but written in a way that it kept you turning pages untill the last page, hoping that everything will turn out for the better somehow for the main characters. I won't post any spoilers here though if it will, therefore you have to read this outstanding good book for yourself I truly recommend it this book, and I will post my review of Kristin Harmels book The Room on Rue Amelie in the next post!!