The Borrowed Name

By: Paul Böer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In the spring of 1992, Albert Miller clears out his mother’s house in Joplin, Missouri, the way he does everything: methodically, column by column, with a legal pad and a numbered list. He is a forensic accountant. He does not panic. He reads what is written.

Then he opens the locked tin box at the back of the cedar wardrobe.

What he finds inside dismantles fifty years of family history in an afternoon. He was not born Albert Miller. He was not born in Missouri. He was not born to the German immigrants who raised him. He was born inside the Warsaw Ghetto in March of 1942, the son of a Jewish mathematician named Naomi Weiss, and he was passed through a gap in the ghetto wall to a Nazi officer’s wife who left no explanation and kept no record — except one.

Moving between 1992 Missouri and wartime Poland, The Borrowed Name follows Albert’s year-long investigation across Bavaria, Warsaw, and Haifa as he pursues a truth that grows more morally complex with every document he uncovers. Who was the woman who saved him? What did she want in return? And what does he owe the mother he never knew — a woman now in her seventies, still alive, still waiting to be found?

At its heart, The Borrowed Name is a novel about what we inherit, what we borrow, and what we finally have to return. It asks whether an identity built on someone else’s deception can still be real — and whether the act of saving one life can begin to account for a lifetime of complicity.

For readers of The Nightingale, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Book One of The Borrowed Name Trilogy.