The Safekeep is Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and recently won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and I can understand why. It is an exquisite study in character, women’s desire and love.

The Safekeep is set in the Netherlands in 1961 and is about a woman named Isabel who lives alone in her family’s country home. Isabel lives a life built on strict routine. She is disciplined and exacting, cold and suspicious, but above all she is repressed. Although she is the protagonist of the novel and the story is told from her perspective, the reader never knows exactly what she is thinking. We are left to decipher her feelings through her body language and her interactions with the other characters.

When Isabel meets her older brother’s new girlfriend, Eva, she cannot stand Eva’s terribly bleached blonde hair and perky, graceless demeanor, and so she is rude to her. When her brother dumps Eva on her doorstep and expects Isabel to let Eva stay in the family home for the summer, Isabel is angry and resentful towards her. The two women are trapped in the house together in the heat of the summer and the tension between Isabel and Eva builds in suspense until it finally reaches a boiling point, and Isabel reveals to Eva what she is desperate to keep concealed from everyone including the reader.

The Safekeep is a sensuously romantic story that does not feel cheap or exploitative. Despite Isabel’s initially prickly nature, you cannot help but be enthralled as love transforms her into a passionate person who feels empathy for others, a person who can appreciate the pain her own family has caused others and wants to make amends for it.

A review that I read of this novel spoiled a major revelation of how Eva comes into Isabel’s life. I am not going to spoil it here because I was disappointed that I did not have the opportunity to see if I could pick up on the subtle clues throughout the story. All I will say is that with the novel’s setting in Europe and proximity to WWII, which continues to affect the characters sixteen years after it ended, it explores how Jewish people suffered at the hands of people who were their neighbours and friends and benefited from their forced removal from their homes by the Nazis. The Safekeep is the perfect combination of historical fiction and romance that is both tragic and hopeful.