‘The Safekeep’ by Yael Van der Wouden     (2024) – 258 pages

This outstanding novel ‘The Safekeep’ is the compelling story of a lonely Netherlands woman. It takes place in 1961.

“Isabel didn’t mind it, the move to the east. She hadn’t any friends in the city, and hadn’t any friends in the country, either.”

Notice that although the woman author is from the Netherlands and has an obviously Dutch name, there is no translator. This novel was written in English.

In some novels, all of the characters are so nice, so thoughtful, that I can’t empathize or identify with them at all. Fortunately ‘The Safekeep’ does not have that problem at all. Not one of the characters here is too nice, least of all Isabel. They can all often be quite mean or nasty. The novel gets high marks for realism.

Nearly 30 years old, Isabel lives alone in her family home. Often she is rude to the point of cruelty. Isabel was “lonely and bitter and took after her mother too much”. About the only people she associates with are her two brothers, the ladies man Louis and Hendrik who lives with his boyfriend. Isabel does have a young maid who comes in nearly every day whom Isabel always suspects of stealing her mother’s heirlooms.

And then Louis asks if his current girlfriend Eva can stay with Isabel at the family home for a month or two while he is on a business trip. Isabel reluctantly agrees to this arrangement, because Louis could kick her out of the family house since it actually is his, him being the oldest child.

With the arrival of Eva, everything changes for Isabel.

“Isabel had spent a lifetime alone. She had spent a whole life without this woman, without her in this house, and now an hour. And now her heart raced at the sound of tires on gravel, the sight of her: first a dot, then a person, then a known shape, coming closer.”

Some graphic love or sex scenes ensue.

‘The Safekeep’ is supremely intense. It kept my mind fully occupied while I was reading it. The story here has the most original plot of any novel I have read this year. I read it very quickly. I won’t give any hints as to the surprise turn the novel takes toward the end.

‘The Safekeep’ is a Must Read. This is one novel you will not forget.

Grade:   A