Author Guide · Historical Fiction
Books Written by
Harmel was a working journalist before she was a novelist — a sportswriter at sixteen, then a decade on staff at People — and she has said plainly that her research method is the one she learned there. It shows. She wrote six contemporary novels first, the sort with a publicist in Paris on the cover, and then in 2012 turned to the Second World War and did not turn back. What she looks for is the corner of the war nobody has filmed: the forgers who made papers for Jewish children, the family camps in the Belarusian forest, the Champagne caves, a German POW camp in rural Florida.
By Lisanne Swart · 16 novels · Historical Fiction · Female Authors · Updated September 2026
Harmel on the forgers behind The Book of Lost Names
Quick facts about Kristin Harmel
How to Sleep with a Movie Star
Her debut. A celebrity reporter at a fashion magazine wakes up in a film star's bed — nothing happened — and has to survive the tabloid version of it.
The Blonde Theory
A high-earning New York patent attorney plays dumb on a series of dates to test whether men are put off by accomplished women.
The Art of French Kissing
A jilted publicist takes a job in Paris minding a chaotic French rock star. First published in the UK in 2007 and in the United States in 2008.
The first appearance of the Paris setting that becomes the through-line of her whole career. Read as an early-career curiosity rather than for itself.
When You Wish
A famous teenage pop star walks away from the industry to try being ordinary after discovering a family secret.
Italian for Beginners
A cautious Manhattan accountant goes to Rome after an old flame and finds a life she had not planned for.
After
A teenage girl blames herself for the car accident that killed her father and tries to repair her family by helping everyone else.
The Sweetness of Forgetting
A Cape Cod baker inherits her grandmother's recipes and a list of names, and follows both to Paris and a wartime past the family never spoke about.
The pivot book. Everything she is known for now starts here: the object that opens the past, the granddaughter who has to go and look, the war seen sideways.
The Life Intended
A widowed music therapist starts dreaming a version of the life she would have had with her late husband, including a deaf daughter who may not be imaginary. Published January 2015; some listings give 2014.
The hinge between the two halves of her career — contemporary setting, but built on grief, memory and two realities running at once.
When We Meet Again
A freelance writer is sent a painting of her grandmother and traces it back to a German prisoner-of-war camp in rural Florida — a piece of the war almost nobody writes about.
The Room on Rue Amélie
Three braided lives in occupied Paris: an American newlywed, an eleven-year-old Jewish neighbour, and a downed RAF pilot on an escape line.
The structural outlier among the early historicals — no modern frame at all, just three wartime points of view. Tighter for it.
The Winemaker's Wife
In the Champagne caves of occupied Reims, two women hide munitions and refugees among the bottles; a 2019 timeline unpicks what they did to each other. Real figures including the German weinführer Otto Klaebisch move through the background.
The purest example of her formula, if you want to see the machinery working.
The Book of Lost Names
Eva Traube forges papers for Jewish children escaping occupied France, and records their real names in a coded religious book so they can one day be given back. Sixty years later a librarian in Berlin finds the book.
Her best and her most read by a wide margin, and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. The premise — that a forger's real work is preserving identity, not erasing it — is the strongest idea she has had.
The Forest of Vanishing Stars
A German girl stolen as a baby and raised alone in the Naliboki forest by an old woman teaches Jewish refugees from the ghettos how to survive the wilderness. Harmel interviewed Aron Bielski, the last surviving Bielski brother, while researching it.
The one that reads least like the others: almost no modern frame, and closer to a survival novel than a mystery.
The Paris Daughter
Two mothers in occupied Paris; one leaves her daughter with the other, and then the bookshop where the child was hidden is destroyed by a bomb. The search runs decades and crosses to New York. Published June 2023 — some lists wrongly say 2022.
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
An eighty-year-old jewel thief who steals only from the cruel goes looking for the sister who disappeared in 1942 Paris with a diamond bracelet. Published in the UK as All the Diamonds in Paris.
Meet Me in Paris
Nine Americans' lives cross over a single week in Paris, among them an ageing songwriter looking for the woman he lost eighty years earlier. Published July 2026.
Novella, alternative titles and the things people get wrong
Three things worth knowing before you buy, because Harmel's list has more traps in it than most:
- How to Save a Life (2016) — A novella, published as an ebook original rather than a full novel. Some retail listings date it 2015.
- All the Diamonds in Paris — The UK title of The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau (2025), not a separate book. This is the single most common duplicate on Harmel reading lists.
- The Art of French Kissing — First published in the UK in 2007 and in the United States in 2008, so both years are correct depending on the edition you are looking at.
- The Paris Daughter — Published June 2023. A large number of lists say 2022; they are wrong.
- No series — Every book is a standalone. She has written no sequels and has said she has no plans to.
Kristin Harmel's Writing Style: A Reporter's Method on a Novelist's Material
Harmel researches like the journalist she was for a decade, and she is explicit about it — primary sources, interviews with historians and survivors, travel to the place, and, unusually, the acquisition of genuine period documents and objects of the kind her characters would have handled. For The Forest of Vanishing Stars she interviewed Aron Bielski, the last surviving brother of the Belarusian partisan group. She lived in Paris in her twenties and has gone back repeatedly; four of her novels are set at least partly in wartime France, and that accumulated research base feeds book after book.
The structural signature, from 2012 onward, is the dual timeline with a present-day inheritor. A contemporary woman in some kind of rupture — widowed, divorced, estranged, stalled — encounters an object that opens onto the war: recipes, a painting, a photograph in a newspaper, a bracelet in a museum case. The two strands alternate and converge on a revelation about identity or parentage. It is not universal — The Room on Rue Amélie and The Forest of Vanishing Stars stay in the past — but it is the house style, and readers who dislike dual timelines should start with one of those two.
On the border between fact and invention she has a stated position: fictional characters, loosely based on real people, set against historically accurate backdrops, with occasional appearances by genuine historical figures. The Winemaker's Wife is the clearest demonstration — the Chauveau family is invented, but Otto Klaebisch and Count Robert-Jean de Vogué were real and are where they belong. What she chooses each time is a genuine, under-told corner of the war rather than one of its famous set pieces, which is the main reason the books do not feel interchangeable.
And the endings are deliberately unclean. She has said that even the happy endings from the Second World War are bittersweet, because everyone involved lost a great deal along the way, and the resolutions bear that out: reunions shadowed by what did not survive. The prose itself is warm, propulsive and emotionally direct — inherited from the commercial fiction she wrote first, and the reason her wartime novels reach readers who would not pick up austere literary Holocaust fiction. It is also the source of the recurring criticism, which is that the mysteries are usually solvable well before the characters solve them.
Kristin Harmel Books in Order
The early contemporary and young-adult phase runs How to Sleep with a Movie Star (2006), The Blonde Theory (2007), The Art of French Kissing (UK 2007, US 2008), When You Wish (2008), Italian for Beginners (2009) and After (2010).
The historical phase runs The Sweetness of Forgetting (2012), The Life Intended (2015, contemporary but transitional), When We Meet Again (2016), The Room on Rue Amélie (2018), The Winemaker's Wife (2019), The Book of Lost Names (2020), The Forest of Vanishing Stars (2021), The Paris Daughter (2023), The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau (2025) and Meet Me in Paris (2026). The novella How to Save a Life sits outside both, in 2016.
Nothing needs to be read in order. There is no series, no sequels and no recurring characters, so the only reason to follow publication order is if you want to watch the writer change.
Where to start with Kristin Harmel
If you have never read her
→ The Book of Lost Names. It is the consensus entry point, it is the best premise she has had, and it is by an enormous margin her most read book.
If you have read that one
→ The Winemaker's Wife for more of the same machinery done well, or The Forest of Vanishing Stars if you want something rougher and less resolved.
If you dislike dual timelines
→ The Room on Rue Amélie or The Forest of Vanishing Stars. Both stay in the war.
If you are curious about the early books
→ The Art of French Kissing is the most representative of that phase, and The Life Intended is the better book if you want the transition rather than the chick lit.
If this is your genre
→ My books by female authors list and the best fiction list have more.
Frequently asked questions about Kristin Harmel's books
How many books has Kristin Harmel written?
Sixteen novels and one novella. Six belong to her early contemporary and young-adult phase, from How to Sleep with a Movie Star (2006) to After (2010); the rest are the historical novels she has written since 2012, with the exception of The Life Intended (2015), which is contemporary. The novella is How to Save a Life (2016).
Is The Book of Lost Names based on a true story?
The characters are invented, but the forgery operation is grounded in documented history. Harmel researched the real networks that produced false papers for Jewish children escaping occupied France into Switzerland, read source material on the war's most prolific forgers, worked with translators on French-language sources, and collected authentic period documents of the type forgers handled. Her stated method is fictional characters, loosely based on real people, against accurate historical backdrops.
Do Kristin Harmel's books need to be read in order?
No. Every book is a standalone. There is no series, no sequels and no recurring characters — asked directly whether The Room on Rue Amélie would get a sequel, she said she had no plans for one. Most readers start with The Book of Lost Names.
What did Kristin Harmel do before she was a novelist?
She was a journalist. She began as a sportswriter at sixteen, covering Major League Baseball and NHL hockey for a Tampa Bay magazine and reporting for the St. Petersburg Times, then spent roughly a decade as a reporter for People magazine, alongside regular appearances on the morning show The Daily Buzz. She sold her first novel in 2004 and it was published in 2006.
What is Friends & Fiction?
A weekly live web show and podcast that Harmel co-founded and co-hosts with the novelists Mary Kay Andrews, Kristy Woodson Harvey and Patti Callahan Henry, with the librarian Ron Block on the podcast. It began as a pandemic Zoom conversation between author friends in March 2020 and launched its first show that April. It now runs as a podcast, a large online community and live events.
“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.”
Kristin Harmel, in a Q&A with Book Club Chat about The Book of Lost Names, 19 July 2020. If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations