The Safekeep

Yael van der Wouden's debut novel won the Women's Prize for Fiction in June 2025. The judges called it "quietly explosive," and that phrase captures how the book works: The Safekeep is set in the Netherlands in the early 1960s, and it follows Isabel, a methodical, controlled woman whose carefully ordered home is disrupted when her brother brings his new girlfriend to stay. Van der Wouden, who is Dutch-Indonesian, gives Isabel's obsessive inventory of her possessions a history and a weight that accumulates slowly, until the novel's moral argument arrives with real force. The book was also shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

What The Safekeep is actually about (the looting of Jewish property during the Nazi occupation, the objects that passed into Dutch households and were never returned) emerges gradually, through the texture of domestic life rather than through direct statement. It is an unusual and accomplished way to handle historical restitution, and faculty in literature, history, and Holocaust studies have found it opens conversations that more explicit treatments sometimes foreclose.

At 288 pages, the novel is assignable in full and dense with interpretive possibility. Van der Wouden's economy of means makes it a useful teaching text for discussions of what fiction can do with indirection and restraint. Published by Simon and Schuster.