Our Take

Yael van der Wouden is doing several things simultaneously in The Safekeep, and the remarkable thing is how cleanly she pulls it off. On the surface it is a slow-burn psychological drama: two women in a house, one resenting the other, the resentment curdling into something more complicated. But the novel is also a reckoning with Dutch complicity in the Holocaust -- specifically the postwar phenomenon of Jewish property being quietly absorbed into Dutch homes and never returned -- and van der Wouden layers that history into the domestic thriller structure with precision and restraint. Isabel is a particularly fine creation: repressed, controlling, self-deceiving, and genuinely difficult to like in ways that make her compelling to read. Van der Wouden never softens her or asks us to excuse her, and that refusal gives the novel its edge. The prose is cool and exact, the pacing deliberate, and the final revelation -- which the novel has been quietly building toward from the first chapter -- lands with the force of something inevitable rather than contrived. Readers who were gripped by Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger for its unsettling domestic atmosphere, or who admired the restrained menace of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, will find much to admire here. A debut of unusual confidence and moral seriousness -- and one of the most talked-about literary novels of the past year.