The Book of Lost Names

by Kristin Harmel

Hope was a dangerous thief, stealing her todays for a tomorrow that would never come.

“My point is that every parent wants what is best for his or her child. But we are all guilty of seeing things through the lens of our own lives. We forget sometimes that it is your life to live.”

Did you know, she had asked him, that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was among the first novels written on a typewriter? It was one of my father’s favorite things. We had a copy, but I had to leave it behind Is it strange that it’s one of the things I miss most from home?

She visited the Mazarine Library just once more, on a sunny afternoon that autumn, and when she stopped at Les Deux Magots on a whim for a coffee on the way home,

“Please, don’t apologize. These are the moments I live for. Reuniting a book with its rightful owner can be magical.”

But we aren’t defined by the names we carry or the religion we practice, or the nation whose flag flies over our heads.

My Eva. After all these years, I am still his, and he is still mine. “Épouse-moi. Je t’aime. That’s what I wrote. I—I love you, Rémy. I always have.”

Many of the details that appear in The Book of Lost Names are based on real methods of forgery during World War II.

I learned about the Fibonacci sequence, and I fell asleep each night trying to add the numbers in my head.

The town of Aurignon is fictional, but it’s based on several similar towns in the area south of Vichy.

Sometimes, something as simple as a pen and a bit of imagination can alter the course of history.

As Eva says in The Book of Lost Names, those “who realize that books are magic… will have the brightest lives.”