This is by Yael van der Wouden, and it was published in 2024. My audio-version was very nicely read by Stina Nielsen (mostly) and Saskia Maarleveld.

The Safekeep is van der Wouden's debut novel, and she wrote it in six months... Wah...

It met with a huge amount of acclaim. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2025 (beating out, for example, The Persians -- with reason, I think). The Safekeep was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, and for the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Reviewers loved it. And, adding to the frenzy, SOOO many of the book sites I follow and respect really raved about it.

I found much to like, but overall I was a little disappointed... Which was disconcerting, given all the clamour.



We're in the Netherlands, and it's 1961, but the ghosts of WWII have not settled. During the conflict, Isabel's mother fled with her three children to a house that had been acquired for them by Isabel's uncle, and came fully equipped, right down to the china and cutlery. The location is a small town in the east of the country (in the province of Overijssel). In an interview, in fact, van der Wouden specifies that it's near Zwolle, "a city in the east of the country where my parents live, and where I grew up".

Isabel, now in her late twenties, is on her own in the big house, and painstakingly cares for its vast collection of objects and furniture, and its garden. Her mother is dead, and her brothers (Louis and Hendrick) have -- as she sees it -- deserted her. So her whole life is that house. She's always aware that it will ultimately belong to Louis, the eldest of the siblings. But for the moment, it's an important figure in her life, full of memories, and the echo of her all-enveloping mother, and other vaguely ghostly vibes. She loves it, but is also subsumed by it.

Isabel is a fascinating character (one of the great plus points of the book). Her obsessive tendencies, extreme introversion, unmoderated speech, and pressing desire to control her everyday environment (constantly listing, checking, and monitoring) suggest she may be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Then again, those traits may the result of trauma. Any which way, she's hard to like, and would definitely be hell to live with. She's domineering, and mercilessly bullies her maid, Neelke. But she is also refreshing: She tells it like it is, and puts up with no nonsense. And her devotion to the house and garden are somehow moving. In the course of the narrative, she undergoes a major awakening, on which more in a minute.

Against this stiff, disciplined, buttoned-up persona is hurled her polar opposite: Eva, the latest in a long line of Louis's girlfriends, who is foisted onto Isabel when Louis goes off on a business trip. Eva comes across as loud, careless, and a little vulgar -- a living, breathing example of everything that Isabel hates.

And yet -- as happens sometimes -- hostility and mistrust turn to passion, adoration, and even maybe love. Isabel's discovery of her own sexuality, and the huge new dimension it offers to her life, is very moving. Eva, clearly torn by the sexual complementarity she finds in Isabel and a duty that she somehow feels lies elsewhere, adds an enigmatic layer to the relationship.

But here's my first beef, because this mutual discovery stuff, while poignant, goes on WAY too long... A couple of scenes could reveal the budding tenderness between these disparate women. But there are SO many such scenes that you start to greet them with a yawn, and wonder whether the book will ever get going again...


Another bit of Dutch history in houses: Semarang, Indonesia, 2013

The rest of this post is riddled with spoilers, so beware. Then again, I think readers will have guessed the way the land lies a long time before they're formally shown the map... I certainly divined the gist of the twist if not its exact contours.

As Amelia Schmidt puts it, this is "the spoiler that isn't because it was obvious early: Eva's a Holocaust survivor, and Isabel’s family’s home was Eva’s family’s. When Eva’s father was deported and died in a concentration camp, the bank sold it to Isabel’s uncle..." Isabel remembers a vaguely threatening presence outside after the war. Well, that would have been Eva's mother, desperately pleading for the return of her home. Hauntingly, Eva has the key to many of the little mysteries concerning the house that have so far baffled Isabel.

All this comes to light only as the result of a big showdown. The obsessive Isabel has been noticing that objects have been disappearing. She has been accusing Neelke. But she accidentally comes across an inventory that Eva has made in the back of her diary. A large number of items have already been crossed off... Isabel confronts her lover, and bitterly accuses her of theft. Eva doesn't deny it, but doesn't explain either. Isabel's sense of betrayal is enormous, and Eva storms off.

It's only afterwards, when Isabel is able to read the diary as a whole, that we understand, through Eva's own voice, what has been going on. It is all part of a calculated plan. She located and cultivated Louis specifically with the aim of gaining access to the house in some capacity or another. She jumped at the chance to stay with Isabel because residence would enable her to purloin as many as possible of the items she feels are rightfully hers. The unexpected relationship with Isabel threw a confusing spanner in the works.

Eva's was a traumatic childhood, and her superficial brittleness and brashness conceal terrible hurt and loss. With her parents in camps, she was committed to the care of people who ended up turning her out. Her mother survived the end of the war, but was inevitably traumatized, and never, of course, regained her property.

This section of the novel -- Eva's big reveal -- is really good. The narrative is moving again, you feel, rescued from all the steaminess, and is showing us what is surely the tip of an iceberg in Europe. The book would definitely have benefited from much more of Eva's voice, and a more equitable account of her side of things.

Schmidt is quite correct, I think, in arguing that the attempt to create suspense around the uncovering of Eva's real persona is the (specious) reason we can't hear from her directly until comparatively late in the novel. This could have been done differently, she maintains: "What if -- instead -- the author had switched to Eva’s POV sooner, revealing Eva’s motives for seeking out this family earlier?" Femke Brockhus agrees. If you're at all aware of the history of the Netherlands, she argues, the revelation comes at the wrong moment: "The fact that you’ve been anticipating it for some time undermines the narrative arc."

Eventually, there's a (kind of) reconciliation between the two women, and we're led to believe that the door might be open for some sort of relationship that also involves a measure of restitution. Whether this is too cutesy an ending is also a matter for debate. (I'm on the yes-it-is side.)



There are three further points of interest.

1.

Those of us whose countries weren't occupied during wartime perhaps find it hard to fully understand the trauma undergone by those that were. So many grey areas... It doesn't have to be out-and-out collaboration. It can be tacit connivance; the determination to turn a blind eye, and not ask too many questions; the ruthlessness shown in cutting corners when you're hungry and homeless and desperate. I'm not blaming anyone. I have no idea how I'd react in such circumstances.

The origins of the story lie with van der Wouden's own perceptions. Born in Israel to an Israeli mother and a Dutch father, she moved with her family to the Netherlands in 1997. She was then ten. She says in an interview: "I grew up in a time and space where the war was absolutely and completely over, and yet it kept on creeping up in strange ways. In anecdotes, in conversations, in remnants in the city where Jews lived or at the synagogue where they used to worship. These places have either been reshaped or emptied out. And in the Dutch language there’s remnants of Yiddish, of the people who used to speak Yiddish. I felt like I grew up in a post-war environment, but the ghost of the war was always present, but also it was me. I was the ghost, the person who reminded people." (She talks more about this here.)

In another interview, she sounds angrier: "I’ve spent so much time here in this country being absolutely furious. Everything is quaint and pretty and life can be relatively peaceful, but at the same time it has such a deeply violent history: through the Holocaust, yes, but also its colonial history. If you read accounts of how the Dutch conducted themselves on their former colonies, especially Suriname and especially as enslavers, accounts often reflect on how no one was as cruel as the Dutch. No one was as inventive in their cruelty as the Dutch. I think in writing this novel I was trying to understand complicity and conformity through small life, through the perspective of one singular person: Isabel. And then, of course, once I’ve created an environment where even I could understand this character’s motivations, the joy was in upending her. It was me having a conversation with myself, with both my Jewishness but also my Dutchness."

This central thread is the novel's most powerful element. Joe Moshenka offers a good summary: "Isabel’s struggles to reckon with or move on from her mother’s death, and to find a way of being in the present, are a mirror and a symptom of a wider failure in the postwar Netherlands to reckon with and atone for the fate of Dutch Jews, offered up to the Nazis with little resistance, the gaps and the homes that they left behind seamlessly occupied and rarely relinquished to the few who returned... Here [van der Wouden] explores not the deportations and the mass murders but the quieter forgettings and self-justifications that came in their aftermath. 'If they cared about it, they would have come back for it,' says one character of a Jewish family robbed of their home. 'No. They’re gone. They’re gone or they don’t care. So many are gone.' Beneath such platitudes guilt lies buried."


In the story, the characters buzz around on bicycles quite a bit. This is almost certainly the kind they'd have been using...

2.

This book wasn't translated. It was written directly in English. Miranda France finds its slight oddities frustrating, and says her "fingers itched for a red pen". Possibly you don't notice these so much in the audio-version, although some of the vocabulary is a bit unusual (eg, "secretary" for desk, and "vitrine" for china cabinet).

Van der Wouden insists: "English is my first language. I grew up speaking English. My mom and my dad both speak each other’s languages very well, but they communicated in English at home. So, I grew up hearing them speaking mostly English, and television and movies were in English. English first language, Hebrew second, Dutch third." She later also studied in New York.

3.

"Thing theory" was absolutely not a thing for me until I read this critique by Florence Hall.

As Isobel Cook's explainer makes clear, it was elaborated by Bill Brown in an article in 2001, and it focuses on the difference between things and mere objects: "It is generally assumed that people make for good subjects, while objects are, well, objects... Things, by contrast, challenge the (to my mind, anthropocentric) assumption that people are in charge of their everyday surroundings by creating situations where humans are directed by the things... Things resist or rebel by calling us to really think about their materiality, and in literary criticism, this means reevaluating our assumptions about their role in the text. This can mean foregrounding physical properties ahead of symbolic meaning, or looking again at the subject/object interactions in a text to enquire whether the 'who' or the 'what' is in control."



Hall relates all this to The Safekeep: "There is no doubt that Isabel suffers from loneliness, regardless of how much she might either deny this, or believe that she is happy in her loneliness. Her solution to this, it seems, is to meticulously organise, record and clean the house’s inventory of plates and silver cutlery. The plates, decorated with leaping hares, is a clear and artistic image that recurs throughout the book, and left a lasting impression after reading. The motion of Isabel passing her hands over these prized objects and comparing them to her handwritten lists demonstrates one of the cornerstones of her character."

It's true: The book even opens with the discovery of a mysterious shard of pottery in the soil of the garden. Isabel hurts her hand on it slightly, and takes it back to the house to examine it: "Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare's leg where the crockery had broken. It had once been a plate, which was part of a set -- her mother's favourite: the good chinaware, for holidays, for guests. When Mother was alive the set was kept in a glass vitrine in the dining room and no one was allowed to handle it. It had been years since her passing and the plates were still kept behind the closed doors, unused... There was no explanation for the broken piece, for where it had come from and why it had been buried. None of Mother's plates had ever gone missing..."

Front and centre, then: A thing.

Interesting.