Some novels arrive not with a crash, but with a slow, deliberate unspooling—the quiet revelation of what has always been there, just under the surface. The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, is one of those books.
Set in a small Dutch town in the mid-1950s, it begins with an atmosphere of controlled domesticity but ends feeling far more raw and unguarded. I picked it up intending to read a few chapters, but I finished it in a single sitting, unable to look away.
What starts as a tense, postwar family drama quietly expands into something bolder: an exploration of repression, desire, complicity, and what it means to live among the ruins of a history half-forgotten.
The novel centers on Isabel, a woman whose life seems held together by ritual and rigidity. She lives in the same house where her mother once ruled with an iron hand and where she now exerts a similar, if more brittle, authority. She polishes the silver obsessively, maintains a cold control over her young maid, and clings to routines that offer structure, but not satisfaction.
Around 15 years have passed since the end of World War II, but the war hangs heavily over the novel. It doesn’t appear in explicit flashbacks or historical exposition, but rather through what’s been left unsaid both in Isabel’s household and in national conversation.
When her charming but irresponsible brother Louis departs on a trip, he leaves behind his new girlfriend, Eva, a vivacious, unpredictable woman who upends Isabel’s fragile sense of order. Van der Wouden draws the reader into a simmering, exquisitely tense dynamic between two women who are equally attracted to and resentful of each other. From their first encounter, there’s something volatile in the air: The novel thrives on the unspoken, the nearly said, the gesture paused just before it becomes action.
Van der Wouden is remarkable in her ability to build and sustain this tension. There’s a near-claustrophobic intensity to Isabel’s interiority, yet nothing ever feels overwrought. The desire that emerges between Isabel and Eva is a complicated mix of longing, envy, self-projection, and shame.
Their dynamic is made all the more compelling by van der Wouden’s prose, which mirrors Isabel’s restraint. The language is tight, austere, and unsparing. When Isabel sees herself in the mirror—“face red, mouth like a violence”—it’s not just about sex or self-loathing, but about a body learning, belatedly and painfully, what it wants.
The novel could veer into melodrama or moralism in less skilled hands, but van der Wouden doesn’t moralize. She observes. She lets contradictions breathe. The result is a book that allows room for the discomfort of unfulfilled desire, shared national memory, and how people justify the spaces they occupy.
One of the most chilling lines comes from a character who, speaking of the original Jewish owners of a home, says the following: “If they cared about it, they would have come back for it.” The sentence is uttered so casually that its cruelty slips in like a draft through a closed door.
This is perhaps The Safekeep’s most subtly devastating achievement: its depiction of postwar Netherlands as a place determined to forget the horrors of the Holocaust instead of reckoning with them. There is no grand confrontation with guilt in the novel.
In its absence, there is a culture of muted complicity, of people slipping back into comfort while stepping around what and who has disappeared. Isabel’s personal repression and her nation’s collective amnesia are deeply entangled. Her obsessive cleaning, her fear of disruption, and her unease with desire all echo a broader unwillingness to confront what was lost—and how it was lost.
But the novel doesn’t collapse under the weight of this historical sorrow. Eva’s flamboyance brings moments of much-needed lightness. Additionally, there’s something humorous in how the novel quietly acknowledges the awkwardness of sex, especially when one has spent a lifetime denying its relevance.
The sex scenes themselves are among the most vividly rendered I’ve read in recent literature: emotionally charged, precise, and entirely unsentimental. They neither glamorize nor obscure, revealing the protagonist’s slow unraveling with startling clarity.
The ending is also less bleak than you would expect it to be. It offers no grand catharsis, but it does allow for the possibility of connection. Even if that connection is tentative, even if it arrives too late to undo what’s been done. In that way, The Safekeep resists the kind of moral symmetry we’re often taught to expect. There’s no dramatic justice for those who forget or erase, only the quiet, painful persistence of those who choose to remember despite how much it hurts.
This is an easy recommendation for readers drawn to character-driven novels with historical resonance. Van der Wouden has a gift for emotional specificity, and an even rarer gift for knowing what not to say. Her silences speak volumes. The novel doesn’t seek to resolve the past or punish those who failed to mourn it properly. Instead, it lingers in that uncomfortable space between forgetting and remembering, repression and awakening with uncommon grace.
