Shannon Staub Book Club: The Book of Lost Names

This month we will be reading and discussing "The Book of Lost Names" by Kristin Harmel. Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it's an image of a book she hasn't seen in sixty-five years--a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names. The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II--an experience Eva remembers well--and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin's Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don't know where it came from--or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer--but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?

This title is available through our catalog. "The Book of Lost Names" is also available as an eBook and eAudio through CloudLibrary.

Copies of this book are available at the Shannon Staub Reference Desk. Please visit our desk or call 941-861-1744 to reserve a copy.

We will be meeting in-person in the Shannon Staub Library Conference Room, as well as virtually on Zoom. Register online to receive the log-in information for the Zoom session.