The Book of Lost Names- Storyline and Book Review

The Book of Lost Names is a historical fiction novel by Kristin Harmel. 

The story is about Eva Traube, an older woman who lives in Florida with her son. Despite her old age, Eva keeps herself active. She works at the place that fascinates her the most—a library—and spends time in the company of books.

One day, a chance encounter with a magazine brings Eva face to face with the image of a book Eva hasn’t seen in sixty-five years. An article that discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II brings about the mention of this book. The book, an eighteenth-century religious text, is thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war. It is now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library and contains some code. Researchers are unable to decipher what the code means. But Eva knows exactly what it means because she was the one who encrypted it!

The story goes back over 60 years to when Eva was a 23-year-old graduate student living in Paris with her parents. When the second world war broke out, Eva was forced to flee Paris with her mother after the night when the Nazis rounded up Jews. Eva and her mother have a lucky escape, but her father gets arrested and is sent to a concentration camp. Eva manages to forge their documents and creates new identities for herself and her mother, and the duo manage to reach Aurignon, a small mountain town in the Free Zone. The plan is to flee from Aurignon to Switzerland. 

But things go differently than planned. In Aurignon, Eva meets a team of people who are secretly working to save innocent people from the Nazis. This resistance group helps people cross the border, create fake identities, and is a part of the bigger network working secretly against the Nazis. Before she knows it, Eva is already involved in the group’s work. She starts actively working towards creating fake identities by forging documents, which helps many, many people safely cross the border and reach Switzerland. 

While Eva sees the good that will come out of her work, she fears that all these names will get forever lost in history. She doesn’t want to erase these real names forever. She, along with Remy, another team member who works with Eva and later becomes a significant part of her life, devises a method to preserve the actual names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. They keep these records in an inconspicuous religious book, which no one would suspect. This becomes The Book of Lost Names.

The story is about Eva, her life as a forger in Aurignon, the people she meets, and her experiences during the war. During these difficult times, as much as she encounters distress, betrayal, and the worst human behaviour, she also experiences love and hope.

It is an engaging novel which keeps you hooked all the way till the end. I loved the story’s context and was curious to know what happens with all the characters in the story. Do they survive or die like millions of others? The only disappointing part was the end. In the end, Eva is able to help decode the names, but there is no mention of the people whose names she preserves. I would have liked the ending more if the author had brought forward all the people who are grown up now but were kids when the war broke out and mentioned how their futures turned out after they escaped. It would have been wonderful if the author had highlighted how the risks that Eva and other resistance members exposed themselves to and the sacrifices they made paid in the end. For me, no mention of them at the end leaves the story incomplete.

Having said that, it was an excellent novel and a lovely read. 

Learn about other exciting books here.

I always read my books on Kindle. That way, I can carry all my books wherever I go 🙂

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