The Safekeep won the Women’s Prize for Fiction on 12 June 2025, having already been shortlisted for the Booker in 2024. In June 2026 the prize passed to Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent, and Yael van der Wouden’s debut became what every winner eventually becomes: last year’s book.
Most prize winners lose something in that transition. The urgency of the moment fades, the jacket quote dates, and what remains is whatever the novel could do without the sticker. The Safekeep is a useful case study in a book that gains from the demotion, because its central device only fully resolves in retrospect — and because a year’s distance makes visible how carefully the novel withholds its own subject.
The Setup, Which Is a Misdirection
Rural Netherlands, the early 1960s, roughly fifteen years after the war. Isabel lives alone in her family’s country house, maintaining it with the kind of obsessive precision that signals, from the first pages, a woman managing something she will not name. Her brother arrives with his girlfriend Eva and asks whether Eva might stay for the summer.
Read as a premise, this is a domestic novel with a familiar architecture: a controlled woman, an intruder, a season of forced proximity. The judges’ description of “a masterful blend of history, suspense and historical authenticity” gestures at more, but the opening genuinely reads as a chamber piece.
That is deliberate. The novel’s method is to let a reader settle into a recognisable shape and then reveal that the shape was concealing the actual story. The prose supports the misdirection — restrained but lyrical, unfolding slowly, closer to finding a forgotten box of photographs in an attic than to a thriller’s escalation.
What the Novel Is Actually About
The subject of The Safekeep is what happened to the possessions of Dutch Jews who fled or were deported during the Second World War.
Not the deportations themselves. The furniture. The houses. The dinner plates and the linen and the deeds. The novel is about the enormous, quiet, almost entirely unpunished transfer of property that happened in the Netherlands while people were being taken away, and about the arrangement of comfortable forgetting that let the beneficiaries live in those houses afterward without regarding themselves as thieves.
This is why Isabel’s obsessive housekeeping is the novel’s engine rather than a character quirk. A woman who counts the spoons and notices a missing plate is a woman intensely invested in the idea that these things are hers. Her vigilance is not about the objects. It is a defence against a question she has never allowed herself to ask about where they came from.
The historical record here is genuinely under-examined in fiction. The Netherlands lost a higher proportion of its Jewish population than almost any other occupied Western European country, and the postwar restitution of Jewish property was slow, partial and frequently obstructed by the ordinary self-interest of people now living among it. Van der Wouden’s novel goes at what has been called a convenient cultural memory loss — not a conspiracy, but a collective agreement not to look.
Why the Queer Love Story Is Structural
The Safekeep is also a novel about two women falling into a physical, consuming relationship over a summer, and it is worth being direct that the erotic writing is central rather than decorative. It has been described in coverage as a romance, and the BBC’s framing of it as a “masterful” romance novel is not wrong so much as partial.
The romance and the history are the same mechanism. Isabel’s entire self is built on not-knowing and not-wanting — a rigid, sealed arrangement. Desire is what breaches it. She cannot begin to see what her family did until something forces her out of the defensive posture that keeps both the house and her own body under strict administration. The novel makes the discovery of desire and the discovery of complicity a single event.
That is a genuinely difficult thing to bring off, and it is where a lesser version of this book would have failed. Making sexual awakening the vehicle for confronting historical atrocity risks trivialising the atrocity. It works here because the novel never suggests Isabel’s feelings redeem anything. Understanding arrives; absolution does not.
The Reservation
A year on, the novel’s construction is more visible, and one aspect of it is worth naming honestly. The Safekeep is a very controlled book, and its central revelation is engineered with a precision that some readers will feel as contrivance. The information is placed to land at maximum effect. On a second reading, the machinery shows.
Whether that is a flaw depends on what you want. If you want a novel that feels lived rather than built, the tightness may read as calculation — and readers who dislike a structural twist in serious historical fiction should know one is coming. If you accept that a novel about deliberate concealment might reasonably be built out of deliberate concealment, the design is the argument.
Why It Still Matters
Because the question it asks does not resolve, and it is not really a Dutch question.
The novel asks what a person owes when they have benefited from a theft they did not commit — when the benefit is not money in an account but the floor under their feet and the plates in their cupboard, and when the theft is far enough back that everyone involved has agreed not to discuss it. That question is live in restitution debates across Europe, in arguments about museum collections, and in any national history where property changed hands under duress and the paperwork was later tidied.
The Safekeep does not answer it. It puts a reader inside the position of the beneficiary and declines to let them off. A prize cycle is twelve months; that discomfort has a considerably longer shelf life.
For readers who want more of what this novel does with moral complicity, R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War works a related seam from the opposite direction — implication through action rather than inheritance.
Sources: Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 and 2026 announcements; The Conversation review of The Safekeep; BBC coverage of the 2025 Women’s Prize; Booker Prize 2024 shortlist.
