‘The Safekeep’ by Yael van der Wouden: Muted desires and histories

Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, ‘The Safekeep’, winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, is a complex saga set in the Netherlands in 1961. This multi-layered narrative delves deeply into both personal and collective histories.

The story follows 28-year-old Isabel as she struggles to come to terms with her sexual identity. Simultaneously, it explores the harsh reality of a nation that failed to deliver justice to its Jewish community after the German occupation during World War II.

Isabel lives alone in the family home in rural Overijssel, isolated since her mother’s death and her brothers’ departure. Her only interactions are rare visits from her brothers, and a suitor she finds more repellent than appealing. The house, more than a dwelling, is a shrine to her mother’s memory.

Obsessed with preserving it, Isabel meticulously monitors every detail — counting cutlery and eyeing the timid maid with growing suspicion. While her younger brother Hendrik has no claim, the house will pass to their older brother Louis once he marries.

This fragile order shatters when Louis brings home Eva, his brash new girlfriend. With her loud presence, messy habits, and disregard for boundaries, Eva invades Isabel’s space, even taking over their mother’s room. As tensions rise and items go missing, a quiet but fierce power struggle unfolds between the two women.

In the isolation of the house, with the hot summer humidity making the walls feel claustrophobic, the tension intensifies. The author skillfully builds this tautness into a sexually-charged atmosphere as Eva’s presence forces Isabel to confront her suppressed feelings of sexuality and admit to a burning desire for the young woman she detests. Isabel is consumed by longing, and this pulsating sensual urgency leads to an unwilling emotional and sexual awakening.

With the realisation comes total surrender, a release from all the pent-up desires and emotions she has kept hidden for so long.

Displacement is another powerful theme, with each character marked by loss and dislocation. Hendrik’s boyfriend, Sebastian, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, faces systemic and recurring prejudice. Isabel and her brothers, uprooted by war and famine in 1944, are forced to flee their home in the western Netherlands and resettle in Overijssel. Eva’s story is perhaps the most harrowing: a violent tragedy in her early years leaves her adrift.

These shared yet distinct experiences of being unmoored from place and belonging deepen the emotional texture.

There’s an air of inevitability that permeates the narrative. Early in the book, subtle cues suggest that something deeper is at play — beyond mere human emotions and interactions. A quiet, unsettling tension builds steadily, layer by layer, until it culminates in a haunting, gut-wrenching denouement that redefines everything that came before.

In its final act, the book delivers a powerful emotional punch, grounding personal loss in the weight of the aftermath of war and giving the story political and social significance.

— The reviewer is a Chandigarh-based freelancer

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