Book review: The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

By Philippa Tracy

Isabel was 11 when she moved into the house outside of the Hague during the second world war. Her mother died there ten years later. Isabel is still there, living alone, when the novel opens in 1961. The house is everything to her, and having control of it and the things in it is a way of having control of her life and her emotions. She clings onto her grief and her mother’s things, like the plates she never uses. “They are not for touching. They are for keeping.” She has breakfast on one of her the plates once a year, on the anniversary of her mother’s death.

Her father had died at the start of the war. Her uncle, Karel, found them the house in 1944 and after the war they stayed there and never returned to their original home in Amsterdam. Her two brothers, Louis and Hendrik, have no real interest in the house. Hendrik lives with his French-Algerian boyfriend, Sebastian, and is thinking of moving to Paris. The deeds will pass to her older brother Louis, who always has a different woman with him when they meet but appears to have little to say to his siblings. Isabel is cynical about his relationships; she thinks about the woman he brought to their mother’s funeral, whose name nobody can now remember. When he invites Eva, his current girlfriend, to stay at the house with Isabel for the summer, the psychological drama begins.

Isabel struggles to relax. She is lonely and lacking in confidence, but also resistant to any kind of joy. She pinches the back of her hand and digs in her fingernails when she is stressed. As small items, like her mother’s teaspoons, start to go missing, the tension builds. Isabel is deeply suspicious of both the maid and Eva. She does not know how to respond to the sexual advances of her neighbour, Johan, who aggressively pursues her, often showing up unannounced and harassing her, pressing “close in doorways”. She clearly has no interest in him. Instead her focus is increasingly on Eva. The sexual tension between the two women rises over the summer and when they finally have sex, it is electric and beautifully written.

The novel is structured in three sections. Without giving away any spoilers, in each section there is a slow revelation of both a passionate love story and the mystery surrounding Eva’s own story. At one point, when the women start to get close, Eva asks Isabel who she is, “Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?” When Eva’s history is finally revealed, so are the secrets buried in the house and linked to the trauma and memories of the German occupation of the Netherlands in WWII. It also helps the reader to understand who Isabel really is.

This is a deeply moving first novel. It is clear why it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 and was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.