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. 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.
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 will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins 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.
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 will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins 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.
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About the
author:
Kristin
Harmel is the #1 international bestselling and USA Today bestselling author
of The Winemaker’s Wife, The Room on Rue Amelie, and a
dozen other novels that have been translated into numerous languages and sold
all over the world.
A former
reporter for PEOPLE magazine, Kristin has
been writing professionally since the age of 16, when she began her career as a
sportswriter, covering Major League Baseball and NHL hockey for a local
magazine in Tampa Bay, Florida in the late 1990s. After stints covering health
and lifestyle for American Baby, Men’s Health,
and Woman’s Day, she became a reporter for PEOPLE magazine while still in college and spent
more than a decade working for the publication, covering everything from the
Super Bowl to high-profile murders to celebrity interviews with the likes of
Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, OutKast, Justin Timberlake, and Patrick
Dempsey. Her favorite stories at PEOPLE, however,
were the “Heroes Among Us” features—tales of ordinary people doing
extraordinary things. One of those features—the story of
Holocaust-survivor-turned-philanthropist Henri Landwirth (whom both Walter
Cronkite and John Glenn told Kristin was the most amazing person they’d ever
known)—partially inspired Kristin’s 2012 novel, The
Sweetness of Forgetting, which was a bestseller all over the world.
In
addition to a long magazine writing career (which also included articles
published in Travel + Leisure, Glamour, Ladies’ Home
Journal, Every Day with Rachael Ray, and more), Kristin was
also a frequent contributor to the national television morning show The Daily
Buzz—where her assignments included flying to London three times to interview
the cast of the Harry Potter films—and has appeared on Good Morning America and
numerous local television morning shows. She even stumbled into a role as an
extra in the 2003 American Idol movie while awaiting an interview with Kelly
Clarkson.
Kristin
was born just outside Boston, Massachusetts and spent her childhood there, as
well as in Columbus, Ohio, and St. Petersburg, Florida. After graduating with a
degree in journalism (with a minor in Spanish) from the University of Florida,
she spent time living in Paris and Los Angeles and now lives in Orlando, with
her husband and young son. She travels frequently to France for book research
(and—let’s be honest—for the pastries and wine) and writes a book a year for
Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster.
Connect
with the author at:
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