The Book of Lost Names
<p><b>“A fascinating, heartrending page-turner that, like the real-life forgers who inspired the novel, should never be forgotten.” (Kristina McMorris, </b><b><i>New York Times</i></b><b> best-selling author of </b><b><i>Sold on a Monday</i></b><b>)</b></p> <p><b>Inspired by an astonishing true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis in this “sweeping and magnificent” (Fiona Davis, best-selling author of </b><b><i>The Lions of Fifth Avenue</i></b><b>) historical novel from the number one international best-selling author of </b><b><i>The Winemaker’s Wife</i></b><b>.</b></p> <p>Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the <i>New York Times</i>. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than 60 years - a book she recognizes as <i>The Book of Lost Names</i>.</p> <p>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 18th-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 does she have the strength to revisit old memories?</p> <p>As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began 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 <i>The Book of Lost Names</i> will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.</p> <p>An engaging and evocative novel reminiscent of <i>The Lost Girls of Paris</i> and <i>The Alice Network</i>, <i>The Book of Lost Names </i>is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of bravery and love in the face of evil. </p>