The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden has won the 2025 Women’s prize. It revisits a dark, under-explored chapter of Dutch history. It asks what happened to all the possessions that Jews who were forced to flee or were taken to camps during the second world war had to leave behind.
The trauma of this history hangs over the novel, a haunting buzz beneath this tale of a woman slowly losing control over her small and regimented world one summer in the early 1960s. That woman is Isabel, who lives alone in her sprawling family home in a rural area of the Netherlands.
The house is the centre of Isabel’s world and she spends most of her time obsessively keeping it in order, as her late mother would have wanted. To her, “a house is a precious thing”. Isabel is its possessive and careful caretaker, suspicious of anyone she perceives as interfering in her relationship with it.
Isabel’s relationship with the house is tied to a difficult childhood under the influence of her domineering mother, who is still asserting control from beyond the grave. Isabel is stuck in this history, aware that “she belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house”. It is the only place she has, and can assert, a sense of control.
But the house does not belong to her, she is simply its keeper. It will be inherited by her brother when he wants to start a family – a future which seems incredibly distant because of his playboy and big city ways. That is till he delivers his gauche new girlfriend, Eva, to stay at the house while he is away on business.
What lies beneath?
Set 15 years after the end of the second world war, van der Wouden’s debut novel unearths terrible crimes from the past and the psychological legacies that still ripple across generations of families, ancestral homes and communities. It is a novel about theft, expropriation and convenient cultural memory loss.
The Safekeep succeeds in blending the political with the domestic and the historical with the personal.
The writing is restrained yet lyrical and poetic, allowing space for the readers to realise how easily injustice and a historical wrong can be quietly concealed under the surface of everyday respectability. The story unfolds slowly, like coming across an old box of photos long forgotten in a dusty attic, which reveals a devastating narrative in fragments.
Eva’s penetration of Isabel’s perfectly kept and regimented world, makes it clear to Isabel that the house and the objects she lovingly “kept” over decades were never, and will never, be hers. This graceless young woman stands in contention to everything Isabel (and her mother) thought a woman ought to be.
As they spend time together and her desperate attempts to enforce control fail, Isabel has to confront the uncomfortable reality of her inheritance – that of the role she plays in her family, the life she has chosen to lead and the house she loves so dearly.
There is mystery in this novel: pieces of a broken plate, missing objects, imperfect memories. The careful attention to detail and suspenseful prose makes the house take on a ghostly presence in the novel, becoming an archive of both sentimental memory and moral ambiguity.
As things become more heated inside the house, we learn more about Isabel’s relationship with her two brothers, which is marked by a similar quiet tension and emotional distance. This family is shaped by its history and by their mother. The ways they grieve their matriarch’s death become entangled with the unravelling of long-held assumptions about their identities, values, each of their ideas about love and relationships, and the meaning of home and family.
This startling debut has moved the literary world, having been shortlisted for 2024’s Booker and now winning the 2025 Women’s prize. The brilliance of The Safekeep lies in its subtlety and moral complexity. It is beautifully written, tightly constrained and poetic, and a deeply moving story about one woman’s desire for truth, justice and transformation.
Manjeet Ridon, Associate Dean International, Faculty of Arts, Design & Humanities, De Montfort University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
