The Safekeep
SynopsisPlot
It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.
Story
About this book
Set in 1961, The Safekeep takes place in the Dutch province of Overijssel, where the physical scars of the Second World War have been repaired and daily life has returned to order. Isabel lives alone in the country house left by her late mother, holding tightly to routine and discipline. Her careful existence is disrupted when her brother Louis arrives with his new girlfriend Eva and asks Isabel to host her for the summer season.
Eva unsettles Isabel from the start. She moves through the house carelessly, sleeps late, and handles objects that are not hers. Small household items begin to go missing, and Isabel's irritation sharpens into suspicion and obsession. As the summer heat builds, her fixation on Eva shifts into something harder to name, pulling the two women into a charged and uneasy closeness.
Beneath the surface of this domestic tension, the novel follows a thread back to the war years and the traces they left on property, memory, and identity in the Netherlands. The house itself becomes central to the story, carrying meaning that neither woman fully controls. Yael van der Wouden sets the personal and the historical against each other inside a single building, letting both press slowly toward a point of collision.
