Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel The Safekeep, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and now winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a quiet storm. It is taut, restrained, and deeply unsettling in the best ways. From a seemingly simple premise, emerges a complex and emotionally charged story of repressed memory, queer longing, and the intergenerational echoes of shame.
Having resigned herself to a life of spinsterhood, Isabel’s life is full of judgements and bitterness towards anything frivolous. Set in 1960s, her world carries echoes of the World War II, even inside the house; it is the same house where she and her brothers were sent to as children to escape the bombings in Amsterdam; the same house where she alone cared for their mother, who took her last breath while holding Isabel’s hand. The house is orderly, silent, preserved like a memory box. Each room is a careful archive of the past, untouched and emotionally suspended, it mirrors Isabel’s inner world: tightly controlled, closed off, resistant to change. So when her brother Louis’ new girlfriend arrives at the door to stay for a few weeks, she takes an immediate dislike towards her. Eva is her antithesis—a dumb, stupid, loud girl with a fake laugh; an outsider who is not to be trusted.
Van der Wouden expertly captivates readers with rich renderings of the unease in the house, the escalating tension between Isabel and Eva, which takes a surprising turn. Van der Wouden’s captures repressed sexuality and longing with striking clarity, letting hate and jealousy alchemise into a fierce and forbidden passion. The summer heat presses down on them like a second skin, and blurs the lines between attraction and surveillance, fear and desire. Filled with sensuality, it dances around the tense atmosphere of the house and the inside of Isabel’s mind.
With considerable skill, Wouden weaves this story of repressed passion with the aftereffects of the World War II and the Holocaust. She shifts the focus from the frequently addressed themes of destruction and displacement and shines a light on the selective ignorance and justifications that came in the aftermath. “What does it matter,” says a character of a Jewish family robbed of their home. “that someone has lived there before? They’re gone. They did not come back for it.” Van der Wouden tackles the disturbing reality of the horrors faced by Jews in the Netherlands as they were forced out of their homes.
In The Safekeep, moving forward is never clean or linear. It is murky, compromised, and shaped by the shadows of the past. Van der Wouden brings light to the silence, revealing how it holds not peace, but the lingering weight of guilt, complicity, and longing.