Anyone who reads a lot and keeps up with the best-seller lists are aware of the steady appearance of World War II focused fiction.   From Kristin Hannah’s “The Nightingale” to Melanie Benjamin’s “Mistress of the Ritz,”  historical fiction fans always have something to read.

 

Kristin Harmel returns to the time period after her best-selling “The Winemaker’s Wife” with a story based on fact.  “The Book of Lost Names” follows Eva Traube who must flee Paris with her mother when her father is arrested.  Hiding out in a small village, she offers to put her artistic skills to use forging documents for the local priest.  Members of the town have been hiding Jewish children and smuggling them to Switzerland so it is extremely important that their papers are as perfect as Eva can make them. 

 

After meeting some of the children she realizes that some are so young that they will not remember their real names and when the war is finally open there will be no way to reunite them with their families.  So, Eva comes up with a way to code their names into a religious book linking their real names with their forged ones. 

 

As she faces down danger, she also falls in love with the member of the French resistance who is helping her; this alienates her mother because he is not Jewish.  Soon everyone in the town is in danger from the priest to the local bookseller when they are betrayed. 

 

“The Book of Lost Names” is a moving love story combined with history and action. 

 

Other new World War II novels are “The Prisoner’s Wife” by Maggie Brookes, “Black Swan of Pairs” by Karen Robards and “All the Ways We Said Goodbye” by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White.