The Book of Lost Names
The Book of Lost Names
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Kristin Harmel on The Book of Lost Names
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A gap she had been writing around for yearsTwo earlier novels had already sent Harmel’s characters across occupied France on forged papers. Only after finishing them did she stop and ask the question she had somehow skipped: who actually made those documents, and how?
I’ve read a ton about the Resistance, but I hadn’t spent much time thinking about where all of the millions of false documents that allowed Jews, pilots, Resistance fighters, and others to escape had actually come from. So I began to dig into it, and I realized immediately that it would be a great basis for a novel.
The forgers gave her a subject, but not yet a shape. That arrived in January 2019, when her literary agent, Holly Root, forwarded a New York Times article about the decades-long effort to return Nazi-looted books to their owners. The piece exposed how difficult identification had become after more than seventy years of lost records.
Combined with my own love of books and libraries and reading, everything just sort of fit together and clicked and became The Book of Lost Names. [paraphrased from audio]
Even with the structure in place, one detail from the research refused to let her go. Forgers could give a child a new name and a convincing certificate, but they could not guarantee that child would later remember the identity being replaced. The question had no comfortable answer, and it became the reason Eva keeps a hidden coded ledger of real names alongside the false ones she creates.
If you forge a baptismal certificate or whatever for, say, a two-year-old, who’s to say that a two-year-old who received forged papers in 1942 is going to remember who they really are in 1944? [paraphrased from audio]
The question of erased identity was not only historical for Harmel. She grew up Catholic and discovered in her early twenties that her father’s family was Jewish. That biographical fact quietly anchors the novel’s central tension between the self that is named and the self that persists underneath.
It’s kind of like the children whose identities have been changed, how much of their identity is carried by their name and by the things they’re told about themselves, and how much of it is what they’re born with, even if they don’t know. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Period documents and a childhood obsessionThe research for the forgery sequences went well beyond books. Harmel tracked down physical wartime artifacts, including a Nazi-issued travel permit from December 1940 and French baptismal certificates of the kind her characters would have fabricated. Working with those objects gave her a standard she held herself to sentence by sentence.
I also have the real-life Epitres et Evangiles, on which I based the 1732 text that is at the center of The Book of Lost Names, and I used it each time I had to describe the code that the forgers place within the book.
The encryption method at the novel’s heart, the Fibonacci sequence that Eva and Rémi use to hide real names inside a centuries-old liturgical text, did not come from wartime archives at all. It surfaced from something much earlier, long before Harmel had any idea she would write this book.
The Fibonacci sequence was something I was very obsessed with when I was about eight or nine. I would lie in bed at night and count the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence in my head until I fell asleep. So who knew that when I was eight or nine years old, I was actually practicing for the book I would write when I was about forty. [paraphrased from audio]
Her named sources for the forgery world included Sarah Kaminsky’s biography of wartime forger Adolfo Kaminsky and Peter Grose’s account of Oscar Rosowsky, a self-taught operative working in unoccupied France. But those texts informed the facts; the childhood fixation on number patterns gave the novel its puzzle.
Harmel spent over a decade as a reporter for People magazine before she turned to fiction full-time, and she has carried the same verification habits into her novels. That background shapes not just what she includes but what she refuses to invent.
I come from a journalism background, and I think I employ the same kind of research and fact-finding methods I used as a journalist to make sure that everything is as real as possible.
The personal thread
Anne Frank and the writer she decided to becomeHarmel has spoken often about the personal biography woven into this book’s themes, but her relationship with WWII storytelling began decades before she started the novel. A single book, read in childhood, fixed the idea that writing was not just craft but consequence.
I always loved to write, but it wasn’t until I read Anne Frank’s diary that I realized that you could change the world for the better with words. That was the moment my dream was solidified.
That conviction, that writing carries moral weight, feeds directly into why she keeps returning to the Second World War. It is not the catastrophe itself that draws her but a particular human pattern she finds inside it: the moment when ordinary circumstances collapse and ordinary people have to decide what they will do next.
I think what I gravitate to most is the idea that during World War II, ordinary people had to rise up and do extraordinary things — or the outcome of the war would’ve been different.
What she wants us to sit with
A pen as a weapon against erasureAsked directly what she hopes readers absorb from Eva’s story, Harmel frames the answer around the novel’s deepest argument: that identity is not a record or a document but something an external power cannot fully reach, no matter how methodical the attempt to replace it.
That no one can take away who you are, because your true identity lies within your heart. And that within all of us, there is endless possibility to do good in the world, and to find our way in the darkness, as long as we have the courage to follow our hearts.
The author’s note closes the book by pulling that argument down from the level of identity to the level of means. The forgers in the novel had no armies, no money, and no official standing. What they had was exactly what Harmel spent years practicing before she knew this story existed.
You don’t need money or weapons or a big platform to change the world. Sometimes, something as simple as a pen and a bit of imagination can alter the course of history.