The Safekeep Wins 2025 Women’s Prize: Yael van der Wouden’s Debut Explores Love, Loss & Holocaust Legacy

This year’s winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize, recently announced, is The Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, which competed with a remarkable shortlist of powerful women’s stories—Good Girl by Aria Aber, All Fours by Miranda July, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis.

While it is not necessary that a novel by a female writer be about women, The Safekeep wraps a complex story about history, memory, loss, loneliness, obsession and twisted revenge around the intense love-hate story between two women.

The book is set in the Dutch province of Overijssel in the early 1960s, a few years after the end of World War II. Isabel, a woman in her thirties, lives in a large country house, with just a maid to help with domestic chores. She vaguely remembers moving to this house as a child, with her mother and two brothers.

Now Hendrik lives in the city with his male lover; Louis keeps changing his girlfriends so often that his family cannot keep track of them. Their uncle, Karel, had bought the house and has willed it to Louis so that he can live there in the future with his family. It is just assumed that Isabel will marry and leave to live with her husband.

At the back of Isabel’s mind there is always a lurking fear that she may, one day, lose the house, but she cares for it with a manic possessiveness. She is aware that “she belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house”, even though she is not the owner, just a caretaker.

The background is that the house was taken over when Dutch Jews were evicted from their homes and sent to concentration camps. Isabel has a faint memory of moving into a house which already had furniture, kitchenware and other things, and later a woman desperately knocking at the door, asking to be let in.

“Before being deported and murdered, Dutch Jews were systematically stripped of all of their properties and possessions, including businesses, real estate, financial assets, artworks and household possessions,” according to research on the Holocaust in The Netherlands.

Gerard Aalders, a Dutch researcher at the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, estimated that the Dutch Jewish community was "the most affected by German rapacity". Like other countries that went through the guilt of complicity with the Nazi regime, there is a collective memory loss about the crimes committed against a community in their names.

If they benefited from it, they are even more prone to forget their collusion. Like Karel insisting that the family that lived in the house had to leave because they did not pay their mortgage, and if they wanted it back, they would have done something about it.

The house, with its secrets—Isabel finds a shard of pottery in the garden and strange initials engraved under a desk—is a metaphor for the weight of the past and the ways in which it continues to shape the present, particularly the burdens it places on women. Men find ways of escape, leaving women behind to cope as best as they can.

One day, Louis brings Eva to dinner with his siblings, an awkward young woman with untidily peroxided hair and ill-fitting clothes. Isabel despises her on sight and is rude to her. She is furious when Louis leaves Eva at the house when he has to travel for work for a few weeks.

Isabel makes no attempt to make Eva welcome and is aggravated even more when her unwanted guest parks herself in the room of her dead mother. She refuses to shift to a guest room and keeps mocking Isabel for her rigidity and joyless existence. Then, Isabel is disturbed to find that things keep disappearing from the house—little things, like spoons and knick-knacks.

Isabel’s isolation seems to be self-inflicted. There is a handsome neighbour, Johan, who persistently woos her, and she keeps rebuffing his advances. Later in the book, when she finally musters up the courage to tell him to leave and never return, he is contemptuous—accusing her of leading him on. “Do you think you have options, Isabel? Do you think they are lining up? At your age?”

What liberates Isabel from traditional expectations, however, is her affair with Eva, which releases all her pent-up desire. Eva disrupts Isabel's carefully constructed world; she becomes the catalyst for Isabel to confront her past, her repressed feelings, and societal judgement.

The dynamic between Isabel and Eva oscillates between hostility and a profound intimacy that Isabel never imagined. The sex scenes are written with a kind of passionate urgency, and the writer amusingly said when she won the award, “Thank you all for not talking to me about chapter 10; you’re very respectful people.”

The twist in the story is the real identity of Eva and her drive to get some kind of justice for the crimes against her, her family and her people. Despite the bitterness that it contains and condemnation of societies that have erased their dark histories, the book conveys hope. Also the idea that, maybe, forgiveness and reconnection of human bonds are left to women to achieve when men have walked away from their destruction.

Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author.

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