The Book of Lost Names

In 2005, Eva Abrams is a retired librarian living in Florida. A newspaper photograph of a rediscovered book stops her short, because she knows that book at once. It sends her back to 1942, when she was a young Jewish woman in wartime France.

After her father's arrest, Eva fled Paris with her mother and settled in Aurignon, a village in the Free Zone. There she joined the Resistance as a forger, making false identity papers for Jewish children who were being smuggled into Switzerland.

The forged papers wiped out each child's real name, and that troubled Eva. With Rémy, another forger, she found a remedy: they hid every true name in a code inside an old book, so that no child would be lost entirely.

The novel alternates between the war years and 2005. In the later timeline the book's reappearance takes Eva to Berlin, where she hopes to learn what became of it and of the people she lost. A quiet love story runs through the wartime chapters, and the mystery turns on one object. The story is inspired by real forgers who helped save children in occupied France.