The Safekeep through Yael van der Wouden has gained the 2025 Girls’s prize. It revisits a depressing, under-explored bankruptcy of Dutch historical past. It asks what came about to the entire possessions that Jews who had been pressured to escape or had been taken to camps throughout the second one international battle needed to depart at the back of.
The trauma of this historical past hangs over the radical, a haunting buzz underneath this story of a girl slowly dropping keep watch over over her small and regimented international one summer season within the early Nineteen Sixties. That lady is Isabel, who lives on my own in her sprawling circle of relatives house in a rural house of the Netherlands.
The home is the centre of Isabel’s international and she or he spends maximum of her time obsessively maintaining it so as, as her past due mom would have sought after. To her, “a house is a precious thing”. Isabel is its possessive and cautious caretaker, suspicious of any individual she perceives as interfering in her dating with it.
Isabel’s dating with the home is tied to a troublesome youth beneath the affect of her domineering mom, who remains to be saying keep watch over from past the grave. Isabel is caught on this historical past, conscious that “she belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house”. It’s the best position she has, and will assert, a way of keep watch over.
However the home does now not belong to her, she is solely its keeper. It’ll be inherited through her brother when he needs to begin a circle of relatives – a long run which turns out extremely far-off on account of his playboy and large town techniques. This is until he delivers his gauche new female friend, Eva, to stick on the space whilst he’s away on trade.
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What lies underneath?
Set 15 years after the top of the second one international battle, van der Wouden’s debut novel reveals horrible crimes from the previous and the mental legacies that also ripple throughout generations of households, ancestral houses and communities. This can be a novel about robbery, expropriation and handy cultural reminiscence loss.
The Safekeep succeeds in mixing the political with the home and the historic with the private.
The writing is restrained but lyrical and poetic, permitting house for the readers to grasp how simply injustice and a historic unsuitable can also be quietly hid beneath the skin of on a regular basis respectability. The tale unfolds slowly, like coming throughout an outdated field of footage lengthy forgotten in a dusty attic, which unearths a devastating narrative in fragments.
The Safekeep is the debut novel from Dutch creator Yael van der Wouden.
Roosmarijn Broersen
Eva’s penetration of Isabel’s completely stored and regimented international, makes it transparent to Isabel that the home and the gadgets she lovingly “kept” over a long time had been by no means, and can by no means, be hers. This graceless younger lady stands in competition to the whole lot Isabel (and her mom) concept a girl should be.
As they spend time in combination and her determined makes an attempt to put into effect keep watch over fail, Isabel has to confront the uncomfortable truth of her inheritance – that of the function she performs in her circle of relatives, the lifestyles she has selected to steer and the home she loves so dearly.
There may be thriller on this novel: items of a damaged plate, lacking gadgets, imperfect recollections. The cautious consideration to element and suspenseful prose makes the home tackle a ghostly presence within the novel, turning into an archive of each sentimental reminiscence and ethical ambiguity.
As issues turn into extra heated within the home, we be told extra about Isabel’s dating along with her two brothers, which is marked through a equivalent quiet rigidity and emotional distance. This circle of relatives is formed through its historical past and through their mom. The techniques they grieve their matriarch’s demise turn into entangled with the unravelling of long-held assumptions about their identities, values, every in their concepts about love and relationships, and the which means of house and circle of relatives.
This startling debut has moved the literary international, having been shortlisted for 2024’s Booker and now successful the 2025 Girls’s prize. The brilliance of The Safekeep lies in its subtlety and ethical complexity. It’s fantastically written, tightly constrained and poetic, and a deeply transferring tale about one lady’s want for fact, justice and transformation.
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