Skip to main content

The Book of Lost Names

Featured Guide

The Book of Lost Names

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. It’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in 65 years: 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 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. 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?

The Book of Lost Names
by Kristin Harmel