Eva's past, although she doesn't want to talk about it, was more heroic than shameful — well, except for her love affair with a Catholic man in France during the war.
She lives in Paris with her parents when the Nazis and their French sympathizers start rounding up Jews. They take away her father while she and her mother are away. Eva turns out to have a gift for forgery and manages to create papers good enough to get her and her mother out of Paris and to the Swiss border. Yet they don't quite make it all the way to freedom. In Aurignon she is recruited by a priest to help smuggle Jewish children out of France. Her forgery skills prove indispensable. In this underground network she meets Remy, the Frenchman she falls in love over her mother's strong protests.
As for the Book of Lost Names, this is a name give to an old book found in the priest's church. Eva and Remy use a code to list in this book the real names of the children they must give non-Jewish names to when they sneak them across the border. Eva fears the smallest children may forget their real names if they are not recorded somewhere.
When she learns of the discovery of the book 60 years after the end of the war, she knows she must return to claim it — and to see if Remy, whom she learns died in the war, left a final message in it for her.
Harmel's plot may be a bit too neat and tidy to be totally believable, but that will be OK with her readers. Who doesn't love happy endings?
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