Eva Abrams, an elderly librarian from Florida, is placing books on a shelf when her gaze falls on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it is an image of a book she hasn't seen in over sixty years – it is The Book of Lost Names. Now housed in the Central National Library of Berlin, it contains a kind of code that researchers cannot decipher. Eva is the only one who knows the answer; but does she have the strength to confront her old memories again?

In 1942, when she was a senior student, Eva was forced to escape from Paris and found refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began forging identities for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. Eva, along with a mysterious and handsome forger named Remy, decided they needed to find a way to preserve the children's real names so they could remember their identities. The information hidden in The Book of Lost Names becomes even more crucial when someone betrays their resistance cell.