Lest you think that all forgers were male, there were plenty of women working in forgery bureaus, too, including Mireille Philip, Jacqueline Decourdemanche, and Gabrielle Barraud in the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and Suzie and Herta Schidlof, sisters who worked in Kaminsky’s Paris lab.

Many of the details that appear in The Book of Lost Names are based on real methods of forgery during World War II. Rosowsky, for example, often used the Journal Officiel to search for suitable false identities. Kaminsky, who had a chemistry background, like Rémy does in this book, stumbled upon the secret for erasing Waterman’s blue ink with lactic acid. It was Gabrielle Barraud who came up with the idea for using a hand printing press to mass-produce official stamps. Rosowsky even makes a covert appearance in The Book of Lost Names; when Geneviève arrives in Aurignon, she mentions having worked for a man named Plunne in an area called the Plateau. Jean-Claude Plunne was, in fact, Rosowsky’s alias; Geneviève is talking about working for him.

During the writing of this novel, my desk was piled high with real-life examples of the kinds of documents Eva, Rémy, and Geneviève would have relied upon and forged. I have dozens of tattered copies of the Journal Officiel from 1944; like the forgers in the book, I even plucked a few character names from the pages of the newspaper. I have an old French baptismal certificate from June 1940, complete with official stamps, and a German-issued Ausweis laissez-passer travel permit stamped in Paris in December 1940. Perhaps most important, I have the real-life, leather-bound Epitres et Evangiles, printed in 1732, upon which the titular Book of Lost Names is actually based. As Eva and Rémy encoded names and messages within its pages, I was using the real pages of the real book as a guide.

As an amusing side note, I was a big math buff as a child; in fact, I used to lie in bed at night and try to puzzle out unsolvable math problems. I dreamed of being famous for being the first kid to solve equations that the world’s most prominent mathematicians couldn’t figure out. (Admittedly, I had strange aspirations! Don’t worry; a few years later, I had much more normal fantasies about marrying Donnie Wahlberg and one day being a pop star.) It was during that phase of math obsession that I learned about the Fibonacci sequence, and I fell asleep each night trying to add the numbers in my head. When I had the idea of using the sequence as part of the code in The Book of Lost Names, I was tickled; all those nights of lying in bed and running numbers in my head hadn’t been a waste after all!

These are just a few of the real-world elements that came together to inspire The Book of Lost Names. If you’re interested in learning more about France in the first half of the 1940s, I’d heartily recommend the aforementioned Kaminsky and Grose books. Caroline Moorehead has also written a fascinating book about Le Chambon-sur-Lignon called Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France. I relied on some of my old favorites—including Jews in France During World War II (Renée Poznanski), Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France (Agnès Humbert), and The Journal of Hélène Berr to round out some of my research, too. And, of course, I lived for a time in Paris and have traveled back to France countless times for research. The town of Aurignon is fictional, but it’s based on several similar towns in the area south of Vichy.

I hope you’ve discovered something new in The Book of Lost Names—and that you’re reminded that 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.

Thanks for coming along with me on this journey—and for being a person who finds something special in books. As Eva says in The Book of Lost Names, those “who realize that books are magic… will have the brightest lives.” I wish you the very brightest days ahead.

Acknowledgments

Oh my goodness, what a whirlwind of a year! All I do is write the words—my incredible agent, Holly Root; my magnificent editor, Abby Zidle; my amazing publicists Michelle Podberezniak (Gallery) and Kristin Dwyer (Leo PR); and my literary miracle worker Kathie Bennett (and her husband, Roy Bennett) are the ones who do the real magic. I’m forever indebted to all of you for your friendship and your hard work on my behalf. It’s a joy to be surrounded by people whom I genuinely adore so enormously. Though I don’t say it often enough, please know how much I appreciate all of you. I’m truly very lucky.

To my foreign rights agent, Heather Baror-Shapiro: You are such an absolute treat to work with, and I’m so grateful to you for all you have done. Thanks, especially, for your continued guidance this year—and the great new home at Welbeck. Dana Spector, you continue to be an astonishing rock star of film rights. I’m also very glad to work with marketing specialist Danielle Noe, who is as lovely as she is talented. And to Scott Moore and Andy Cohen: We are going to make a movie together one of these days—I know it! Thanks, too, to Susan McBeth and Robin Hoklotubbe, two women who run amazing events that bring authors and readers together.

To Jen Bergstrom: I couldn’t be prouder to be a Gallery Books author. It has been such an honor to be part of the Gallery family since 2012, and I am forever grateful for the way you’ve helped me grow as an author during that time. You run a wonderful ship, and I’m just happy to be aboard. Thank you so much for all your support and kindness. Thank you, also, to the rest of my Gallery team, including Jen Long, Sara Quaranta, Molly Gregory, Sally Marvin, Anabel Jimenez, Eliza Hanson, Lisa Litwack, Chelsea McGuckin, Nancy Tonik, Sara Waber, Ali Lacavaro, Wendy Sheanin and the rest of the incredible Simon & Schuster sales team, and, of course, Carolyn Reidy. And thanks as well to my awesome team at S&S Canada, including Catherine Whiteside, Greg Tilney, Felicia Quon, Shara Alexa, Kevin Hanson, and Nita Pronovost.

A special thank-you to a handful of people who helped out with the research for this book, including researcher and author Renée Poznanski, French translator Vincent, Polish translator Agrazneld, Russian translator Michael, German translator Jens, and of course my dear old friend Marcin Pachcinski, who swept in with Polish terms of endearment exactly when I needed them.

I mention in the dedication that this book is partially in honor of booksellers and librarians everywhere. I can’t say enough about how much I’ve been impacted by the magic of bookstores and libraries. Books can change lives, but it is the people who love them, who dedicate their lives to them, who make the real difference. If books can’t find their way to the readers who need them, who will be touched by them, who will be transformed by them, they lose their power. So thank you from the bottom of my heart to anyone who works in a bookstore or a library—and especially to those of you who have been courageous and adventurous enough to become bookstore owners, which must be as perilous at times as it is rewarding. Books are more than just words on a page; they are bridges to building communities and to developing more compassionate, more aware citizens. Those of you who love books enough to want to share them are truly changing the world.

I’d also like to acknowledge five very special writers: Linda Gerber, Alyson No?l, Allison van Diepen, Emily Wing Smith, and, especially, Wendy Toliver, the writer who brought all six of us together several years ago for the first of what would become an annual writing retreat. We write together only once a year, but that week always means a great deal to me, as does the friendship we’ve built over the years. I consider the five of you some of my closest friends. Being around you makes me a better writer and a better person. And to Jay Asher: Though you haven’t been to the retreat in a few years, you’re one of us, too! I can’t wait to read the next books from all my Swan Valley friends!

The best writers also tend to be supportive of other writers, and I’m glad to be part of a community of women and men who work to build each other up. A special thank-you to “Mary Alice and the Kristies”—fellow authors Mary Alice Monroe, Kristina McMorris, and Kristy Woodson Harvey—just for being awesome human beings and the best fake bandmates and steam room sisters I could ask for.

A special thank-you to all the book bloggers and reviewers, who do such a wonderful job of building an online community—especially to Melissa Amster and the queen bee, Kristy Barrett, both of whom went out of their way this year to help a fellow author when I asked! All of you are incredible, and I’m so grateful to you for sharing my books with readers—and for promoting reading in general.