The Book of Lost Names

The Book of Lost Names
by Kristin Harmel
388 pages, Gallery Books (2020)

Read September 2025

I first read this title as our September sisterhood book club pick, and it’s a book that’s sat with me for weeks so I’ve attempted to organize my thoughts in this review/post.

A young woman after fleeing a roundup in Paris finds herself forging documents to help Jewish children escape Nazi-occupied France during World War II, encoding their real names in a hidden book so their identities won’t be lost forever. Decades later, the discovery of that book forces her to confront the past she’s never discussed. The novel explores grief, the bonds between parents and children, and for all of us, a degree of what could have been had just one small event in our lives happened differently. It’s more hopeful than many Holocaust novels, though some plot points felt a bit farfetched.

It’s been a while since I’ve read in this genre. I overdid it many years ago and there’s only so much trauma, even when cushioned in fiction, you can read. In many ways, Harmel’s novel is different; it felt more hopeful than many of the titles I’ve read. However, it’s still a story of trauma.

I was curious what the sisterhood discussion would cover. At first, I was surprised that the group was more caught up in the plausibility of passing with the forgeries than much else. I was hoping the discussion would center on Eva just hopping on a plane to Europe and then jumping on an earlier flight when her son tries to slow her down. We had perhaps 30 seconds on that, but as it’s their reality (whether or not that sort of journey is plausible) they didn’t really want to discuss it.

We spent considerable time discussing the complicated relationship between a daughter and her mother, especially for one in deep disbelieving grief and a daughter unable to take time to mourn because she has to continue living. That mother-daughter dynamic, the weight of unspoken histories and the grief that makes connection impossible, resonated deeply.

The novel balances the horror with the very human story of a daughter trying to survive and also in an imperfect way care for her grief-stricken mother. Are any of us perfect caregivers? The storytelling interweaves Eva’s journey in the present and her son’s bewilderment at her sudden decision to fly to France with the events of Eva’s past. The story is richer for helping the reader understand the choices she made both then and her urgency now. And her struggle to figure out how to explain to her son when she’s faced with not just the book she’d thought lost but her entire hidden life.

I think what’s hard for many readers is not understanding how that time was just not discussed after. But that’s true of many children whose parents underwent trauma. It may not have been on the scale of the Shoah but there are similarities for many families. What is also challenging is accepting how we may think of questions today and it is bittersweet, painful, and difficult when we realize they are now impossible to ask. Eva’s commitment to call her son and explain is both the most hopeful and hardest part of the book for me.

Reading this at midlife, I find myself caught between Eva the young woman making impossible choices in wartime France and Eva the semi-retired librarian finally finding what she thought lost and able perhaps to speak of some of it to her son. I understand the silence. My parents experienced a different trauma and it’s one that shaped my life. I wish my mother could have shared the weight of carrying some of her stories and understood that yes, the fear that speaking them aloud may change everything, but it wouldn’t necessarily have caused the gloom she predicted. In many ways, reading it now I find it a book about the questions we wish we’d asked.

I think this is a book that can be reread, with more depth found with each reading. I’m surprised by how long it’s sat with me as I draft these thoughts over a month after reading it. It’s not in an uncomfortable, under-my-skin way, but there is something about the story that keeps surfacing in my thoughts. Yes, it’s set in the horrors of the Holocaust, but at its core it’s an exploration of parent-child relationships and inherited trauma that many readers will find resonates beyond that specific historical moment.