WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2025: An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge
SUSAN'S REVIEW
Every year I make a concerted (sometimes exhausting, sometimes frustrating) effort to read every novel on the Booker Prize shortlist. I was particularly impressed with the quality of the 2024 selections (while hoping that either Percival Everett’s James or Charlotte Woods’ Stone Yard Devotional would get the gong). But for a reason I can no longer remember, I didn’t read Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep. Belatedly, then, I want to recommend this remarkable novel to those of you who, like me, missed it the first time around.
The novel begins with a scenario reminiscent of a Harold Pinter play, in which an enclosed domestic space is disrupted by the arrival of a stranger. The space in The Safekeep is a well-appointed family home presided over by the emotionally rigid, obsessively orderly Isabel, one of three siblings who have inherited the property from their mother. The stranger is Isabel’s older brother Louis’s latest flame, Eva. When Isabel meets Eva at a restaurant, she silently judges her as uncouth, embarrassingly flirtatious and superficial; when Eva unexpectedly comes to stay in the family home on her own, Isabel openly treats her with aggression or disdain. What follows is classic Pinter: the new arrival is an object of suspicion (is Eva stealing the silverware or conspiring with the maid?), and a threat to Isabel’s power and self-possession.
But what’s not classic Pinter is the specific historical and political context in which an increasingly chilling drama plays out. Set in the early 1960s in a provincial Dutch town, and seen from Isabel’s perspective, the highly unsettling relationship between the two women is radically transformed into one of intense sexual passion, intimacy and affection. And yet … The novel skilfully plants hints about Eva’s past to which Isabel, sheltered by her life of economic privilege and blinded by sexual and emotional need, remains shamefully oblivious. What she ultimately discovers about her lover confronts her with crucial ethical questions: who has the right to own property and people? Can reparation ever be made for past injustices? Who has the right to love?
Such a bald summary can’t possibly convey the novel’s emotional and political force, as well as the range of issues it explores. The rawness and beauty of lesbian desire; the persistence of post-war trauma and moral hypocrisy; the tensions of class difference; sibling alienation; and what it might mean to change a house into a home. The novel’s extensive references to windows and doors asks us to consider the claims of people looking in from the outside, and whose knocks go unheard or are deliberately ignored. The Safekeep interweaves a deeply moving love story between two damaged people with a searing critique of the politics of post-war Europe.
I’m glad I made the time to read this historical novel which is also an urgent narrative for our times. Copies are still available at the Lane.
PUBLISHER REVIEW
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2025: An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge
It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep - as a guest, there to stay for the season…
In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known...
