Set in post WW2 Holland, it revolves around Isabel, a reserved and somewhat neurotic woman living alone whose life and house are turned upside down with the arrival of her brother who summarily deposits his current girlfriend Eva, to stay with Isabel for an undefined period of time.
Inevitably tensions and emotions ramp up in unexpected directions, as both Isabel and Eva’s tangled back story is revealed.
A total gem of a book, beautifully written with marvellous spare descriptions and details of life in the house and I also learned a lot about life in Holland during this period, a definite candidate for my book of the year so far!

Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read this book.

The Safekeep is a really atmospheric, tense, engaging, and different novel which took me on a journey that i did not expect to go on when I read the blurb. It’s a quick and interesting read, with great writing and characters that are well developed. I really enjoyed it!

This is an intense and quite claustrophobic story, set in the Netherlands in 1961, dominated by two main characters, Isabel and Eva.
We meet the now nearly thirty-year-old Isabel in the house her family had moved into when she was eleven. She lives there all by herself with only the regular appearance of the housekeeper for company; her mother died recently and her brothers have moved out. She leads a lonely and solitary life, she is unhappy, full of worry and spends her days in a very regimented way obsessively counting and cleaning household items. When Eva comes on the scene, Isabel’s routine gets fundamentally disrupted and her life is turned upside-down.

Initially, Eva comes across as a happy-go-lucky girl and the deeply suspicious Isabel despises everything she represents. But the reader, along with Isabel senses that there is something hidden under Eva’s façade. She gets under Isabel’s skin and triggers an avalanche of desire and painful self-discovery, all very beautifully written. It was the beauty and precision of its language that kept me going through the second part of this book, which, for my liking moved too slowly, dwelling as it did on the same issues. I am however glad I persevered, since part 3 introduces a new theme to the narrative, that gave what had become in parts an exercise in navel-gazing a new and unexpected dimension.

I liked this book a lot: for the intense and beautiful way it captures desire, for the sensitive way in which the trauma of war is reflected in every aspect of life, and for the sensual way in which human interactions are captured. More than just a good read.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Safekeep was an unexpected enjoyable read for me. I went into it tentatively, unsure what would happen or how the, now finished, World War 2 would rear its head once more.

It sees a tense, tumultuous relationship build from an unexpected place. Isabel has cared for her late mother’s house since her passing and tends to it meticulously. When her brother attends a work trip, leaving his girlfriend, Eva, in Isabel’s house and care, she is horrified. How do you share a house with someone you despise? How do you let them into your life?

For me, the start of the book was slow but as I read more, it became harder and harder to put it down. This story was such an interesting take on an element of the war that I have found is very rarely written about.

The Safekeep takes place in a Dutch province in 1961 where its main character, Isabel, lives an orderly and quiet life, alone in her childhood home. But the arrival of Eva, her brother’s current girlfriend, will soon shake her rigid world. This book is an absolute stunner and I almost do not want to write anything more about it, so not to spoil the experience. But it is an exploration of one’s place in the world, belonging, ownership and history. The pace is slow, but the atmosphere of the book is soak up with heat, tension, love and hate. This is a book full of secrets and hard truths, and as we get to know them, we realise how well developed the characters of Isabel and Eva really are, how well they hide their true selves from others and from themselves. A really special book to me.

Lovely writing that keeps you enthralled throughout. Tale of romance, lives lost, war torn Holland and the lives of people that lost so much.

The characters are beautifully portrayed, delving into the sexual lives of those involved. Lesbians and homosexuals that came out in the 1960's. Memories bought to the fore from childhood's in the past.

Thank you Netgalley for letting me read this book.

The more the story of the house was revealed the harder I found Isabel's character was to believe. A woman who lives alone and has no internal life or curiosity. I see it as a form of trauma but also a struggle of the author.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden


It's 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. 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...

A very good plot that kept me reading for much longer than I had planned.
Can't say too much without giving it away , but it's beautifully constructed and eloquent.
A joy to read.

An unsettling, peak-behind-your-fingers read. Thought it was a wonderful read, reminded me slightly of 'The Reader'. I hope it does well. It deserves a large readership.

"Safekeep" by Yael van der Wouden is a captivating exploration of desire, suspicion, and obsession set against the backdrop of the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961. The novel delves into the intricate dynamics between two women, delving into the darker shadows of their shared past and the lingering legacy of World War II.

The setting is richly atmospheric, evoking the lush landscapes of the Dutch countryside while also hinting at the underlying tension simmering beneath the surface.

I expected more of a thriller aspect based on the book's description. Instead, the novel takes a more nuanced approach, focusing on the complex relationship between the two protagonists and the psychological undercurrents that drive their interactions.

At times, the pacing felt a bit uneven, and the dialogue came across as disjointed. However, for those willing to embrace the novel's unconventional style, "Safekeep" offers a unique and compelling reading experience.

Overall, "Safekeep" is a thought-provoking and sexy, atmospheric novel.

A really thought provoking read. I loved the characters and the story unfolded in a really great manner. Recommended.

Set in the 1960s in post war Holland, the Safekeep is Yael van der Wouden's debut novel and the prose is excellent, very tight and controlled, while the characters are well written and believable, if not very likeable! The author creates a spell of tension that spins itself around the main characters, Isabel and Eva, from the start and the plot takes some unexpected turns.

While I appreciated the quality of the writing the book itself wasn't my cup of tea. It may have been the atmosphere of the time period it was written in but felt that it had quite a repressed tone for a large part of the novel.
Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for an early release copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was an unusual choice for me, but as I enjoy reading books in translation - and haven’t ever read one by an author from the Netherlands - I wanted to give it a try.

Set in the early 1960s it tells the story of an insular young woman whose relationship with her family home is the only real relationship in her life. When her brother suggests his girlfriend moves in with her whilst he works abroad for a few months, her world is turned upside down in more ways than one.

I wanted to like this book. The reason for Eva wanting to infiltrate Isabel’s life adds an interesting twist that I didn’t suspect, but in general the sexual tension between the two characters - and the way their relationship develops - felt just a little bit forced and sudden given how emotionally repressed Isabel is suggested to be in earlier chapters.

The war causes Isabel, her brothers Hendrik and Louis, and their mother to flee Amsterdam for the quiet safety of a large, rambling house in a rural part of The Netherlands. Now, years later in the 1960s, her mother dead and her brothers gone, Isabel lives alone in the house. Always a solitary soul and an outsider, she becomes inextricably linked to the house, its walls and contents all tangible links to her mother. She spends her days obsessively ordering the house, making sure everything is where it belongs.

A childhood of leaving and loss has left Isabel cold and withdrawn but beneath the irritability and anxious need for order is a yearning. When her flakey and carefree brother Louis needs to travel for work and asks to leave Eva, his latest in a long line of girlfriends, in the house with Isabel, she is appalled at this irritating invasion of her space. But as irritability turns to something else, Eva unleashes a whole new side of Isabel, and her eyes are opened to a side of herself, and her own history, that she perhaps in some way always suspected but never really acknowledged.

This is an absolutely striking and enthralling debut. Exploring themes of displacement, loneliness, loss, need, burning desire, anger, childhood memory and the dark legacy of war, this is an atmospheric, absorbing and highly charged read. Isabel is an intriguing and multi-layered character, and the narrative style, often breathless - many sentences of the dialogue left unfinished, trailing off or cut short - adds to the tension, the anxiety, the sense of awkwardness, uncertainty and volatility that pervades both the story and Isabel’s own inner life. She has lived a life of loneliness until someone comes into it, filling a void and unleashing a desire, an all-consuming need for connection, for touch, that has possibly been simmering there all along.

The writing is atmospheric, with care given to creating a sense of place, the breezy, creaking rambling house and garden almost becoming a character in itself. With transportive, immersive writing and a plot turn that is absolutely captivating, exploring a dark time in history through the compelling story of one lonely woman, I loved this.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my DRC.

I am giving this book five stars for its prose, its characterisation and the intriguing relationships that are slowly revealed. However, I do not want to write a long review as I do not want to give away any spoilers. Having a great aunt who lived in Holland and hid a Jewish boy during the war, I felt I knew quite a lot about the Second World War and how it affected Holland but I most certainly did not know about post war Holland which to me, after reading this fictionalised but nevertheless historical novel, was almost as shocking as what happened during the war. This book should be in all school libraries. Thank you Netgalley for giving me an advance copy.

What an astonishing book. This will stay with me for a long time. Tension , in the writing, which retains a huge part of the original language in its restrained and sparse character, and also the progress of the narrative. There is a darkness hidden in its history, which we can only guess at in the opening chapters. Descriptions are never sentimental, but are often heart stopping in a way that looking at a beautiful Dutch painting is. There is colour and depth to it. The main character really is the house, it seems to have been imbued with as much character as the occupants of the strange and beautiful tale.
I may read it again.

Really loved this, felt romantic in a similar way to Portrait of a Lady on Fire but with the added political and moral concerns of post-WW2 Netherlands - a historical viewpoint I felt was really valuable, made this more than just a historical romance and gave added important depth to the narrative. My only issue with this book and why I'm hesitant to give it a full five stars is that I felt the character development from the protagonist was too fast and without much internal conflict - she starts out being a very unlikable, repressed character but once she's fallen in love she drops most of the unpleasant aspects of her character, I didn't feel that transition was particularly believable. I would also have loved to spend more time with Eva's point of view - she seems really compelling as a character but the majority of the book we spend with Isabel. At a tight 256 pages this is quite a short book and I think letting it breathe a little and spend more time with those aspects would have bumped it up to a five stars from me. But a great book (a debut novel!! astonishing), and I'm looking forward to seeing what the author does next.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book with no obligation to review.

I enjoyed this book and the characters, interactions and dialogue all ring true. I was surprised at how things work out for Isabel and although I guessed Eva's secret, it was still a good one and didnt spoil the story,

i always try to root for the underdog but at the start of the book Isabel is really so unnecessarily unpleasant to everyone. She seems older than her years and it's hard to remember that Eva is older than Isabel.

There is a lot of water in the book, a lot of mist and rain and I felt there was a misty quality to the writing. I am not sure how to explain it but I could just see the wide landscapes and I was reminded of Dutch watercolour paintings.

I also learned something about Holland and the Nazi invasion and what happened to the people who were taken away and what happened to their possessions. I had not really given that any thought before. I knew that In Nazi Germany people moved into other people's houses but I had not thought about Holland where, it appears, the houses were obtained by a more "legal" process through bank repossession and sale which does beg the question "who really owns the house?"

An enjoyable and interesting read.

This isn't your run of the mill historical novel, this is something extra special. The main characters Isabel and Eva are connected in so many ways, some which you will love, some which will shock. Recent historical events are so relevant to today's society and it is bound to spark conversation and debate about rights and possession. Definitely a special read.

In "The Safe Keep" readers embark on a journey into the world of keeping a house and the relationships connected to a house. This charming book offers a unique insight into the intricacies of household management, making even the most mundane tasks seem extraordinary. The relationships between the siblings and their partners draws the reader in from the beginning and you are interested until the very last sentence.

The author's subtle storytelling and attention to detail create a vivid picture of the daily routines and challenges faced by the protagonist, Isabel. Each activity is described with precision, drawing the reader into the world of Isabel.

I would highly recommend "The Safekeep" to readers. The author's ability to capture the reader's interest from start to finish is truly commendable.