We’ve decided to turn up the heat this holiday season with our December book recommendation, The Safekeep, by Yael Van Der Wouden. This debut novel, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year and was nominated for the Man Booker prize in 2024, will have you cancelling plans, hiding away from your festive social life to curl up by the fire and devour it in one sitting. It might also have you coyly smiling on public transport. A perfect antidote to the cold winter months.
When an interloper encroaches on Isabel’s lonely, housebound existence in the Netherlands post World War II, one summer transforms her world into something irrevocably changed.
What’s The Safekeep about?
It’s 1961. Three siblings have a connection to the family home, a stately home nestled in the Dutch province of Overijssel in The Netherlands, but only one may keep it. One brother, Hendrik, has no interest in keeping the house; he gladly left it to cohabit in the city with his boyfriend Sebastian. The other brother, Louis, is promised he can inherit it the moment he decides to marry – an arrangement agreed upon by their Uncle Karel, whose past resourcefulness had granted the family the house. But the house, once busied by the sounds of the brothers, is now quiet, inhabited only by their sister, Isabel. Fifteen years on from the war, Isabel is deeply protective of its upkeep and contents. She spends every day meticulously ensuring the crockery and cutlery are exquisitely dusted and cared for, to honour her late mother who died from sickness. This is the life she has built for herself; nearing thirty, living alone, save the housekeeper, Neelke.
Her disinterest in marriage raises concerns from the men around her. Except there is Johan, who seems only to exacerbate her loneliness, tightly winding her up in her own world like a spring.
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Enter Eva, Louis’ new girlfriend, ritualistic in his fanfare of bringing a new girl to the house every summer, only for him to blithely swap her out for another in the next. Isabel treats Eva with sanctimonious disdain, growing increasingly suspicious of her stealing as possessions begin to disappear from the house. Isabel becomes tormented by her own consternation. Every move Eva makes feels overbearing, increasingly in more ways than one.
Then it is just the two of them, left alone in the house for a summer.
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What stands out about The Safekeep?
Van Der Wouden skillfully crafts sentences to build tension, transforming what begins as a psychological thriller into a tumultuous and heady predicament. We as the reader feel breathless, fatigued in the stifling summer air, anticipating their every next move. The house closes in around us; we try not to creak a floorboard as we watch on.
The novel burns slowly, then comes all at once, told using the most exquisite storytelling skills of tension and release. Van Der Wouden weaves the tight strings of a thriller with the yearning and high stakes of a romance. Set against the complexity and atrocities of the German occupation, its historical context comes alive in Part III, anchoring the novel with brilliant multilayered storytelling and depth. It prompts us to question the meaning of a house, how it becomes a home, and what ties us to them.
Sentences perfectly crafted build and build, distract, then release. It reminds me of a line I read in a recent piece by author Megan Nolan, who writes, “a lot of my fiction is moment by moment and bodily impulse by bodily impulse”. This is certainly what Yael Van Der Wouden achieves in The Safekeep. You can feel the heat in the room. Sound is its own character in the novel; you can hear the clink of cutlery at the dinner table amid a pause in the conversation, or the wet clicks of a kiss from another room.
Arguably, the novel becomes a little indulgent here, as Isabel and Eva’s physical connection consumes the plot for a while. But to counter that argument, lesbian sex is so rarely depicted, and depicted accurately. There is a lot of sex in this novel, and it is written well.
Picking the plot back up, Van Der Wouden masters a Sarah Waters-like attention to detail and historical context that drives the emotional stakes of the plot, with a contemporary, sharp voice that places women’s desire unflinchingly at the centre of this debut novel. The tense, surveillant dynamic between two women is reminiscent of Passing by Nella Larsen, with the criminal undertones in style that characterise Patricia Highsmith’s writing. Their identities shift under the watch of those around them, like characters in a doll’s house, tapping into the period drama style of unveiling societal expectations. Their transformation reminds me of the evocative short story, ‘Bliss’, by Katherine Mansfield; it begins with a distant thundering, until the alarm bells of self-discovery and desire ring like a brilliant tree unfurling its blossoms.
The Verdict?
The Safekeep is a beautifully atmospheric novel that feels both hyper-focused and epic all at once, a testament to its taut, vivid and enchanting prose, made all the more impressive considering it is a debut written in the author’s second language. Prepare to devour it in one sitting. Especially Chapter 10. Fans of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and movies like Call Me By Your Name will love this novel.
Extract from The Safekeep
“Isabel was too muddled, all of a sudden too muddled. She turned and held her hands to her face and then righted herself, back straight. She needed to go to bed. She needed to shower, to wash herself. To sleep. To wake up and not remember this with the same clarity.”
Our Star Rating
You can grab your copy of The Safekeep at Bookshop.org. Still need more WLW recs to get through winter? Check out our queer book reviews here.
Nonchalant x
