The Book of Lost Names

By Kristin Harmel

DISCUSSION DATE: 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 13, 2025
LOCATION: The Elusive Grape, 129 N. Woodland Blvd, DeLand, FL 32720

About the Book

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than sixty 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 does she have the strength to revisit old memories?

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 The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

An 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.

Click here to buy the book on Amazon.com.

This Month’s Icebreaker

If you could live in any book world, which one would you pick?

Discussion Questions

• How does Eva’s work with forged documents reveal her resilience and courage?
• What impact does the rediscovery of The Book of Lost Names have on Eva’s life in the present?
• How does the novel balance the personal and the historical in its storytelling?
• What did you think about Eva’s relationship with Rémy and how it shaped her choices?
• How does the theme of preserving identity resonate throughout the novel?