The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden (audiobook)

 genre: historical fiction

Isabel leads a lonely and secluded life in the Dutch house that had once been filled with her mother and her brothers.  The house itself is like a cave where she hides and hoards all the things that remind her of time gone by. By the beginning of the 1960s, Isabel is more of a recluse than not so when her brother just gives his girlfriend permission to stay in the home a while, Isabel is NOT okay.  Eva is loud and brash and really everything Isabel is not and so the house that once felt like a haven now vibrates with everything Isabel cannot stand.  Eve drives Isabel to the brink of what she can handle and then the house itself casts a spell that even Isabel's own rigid inner world can't resist.

I decided to try this because it was recommended in my local independent bookstore and it recently won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025, so I didn't even read the blurb, I just got the audiobook from my library.  It's in a unique, post-WWII time period where Isabel's town looks mostly put back together into its pre-war state but for the people who experienced the war and its immediate aftermath, on the outside they may look the same but inside, there is trauma that can't help but bubble to the surface.  I was so intrigued by how Isabel looked at her world and those that surrounded her.  Her extreme sensitivity, her unique way of categorizing her world, the way she wants so badly to not care about people but yet her whole brain is wrapped up in the tiny nuances of them.   I most especially found the last third of the book to be so, so well-written and timely.  It shook me and gave voice to issues of ownership and reparations in a visceral way.  It was interesting to think about how much our THINGS can matter to us when our loved ones are lost.  I also have maybe never read any Dutch literature before and I loved the setting in the countyside among such a stoic people.

Note to readers but with spoilers: there is a sapphic storyline with many open door scenes.  You can skip over them if you don't care to read about female lovemaking - and this book was good enough, to me, that I feel like if you can just skip ahead when you see them coming, this is a really powerful story.  There aren't any important plot points during the "scenes" so you won't get lost if you skip them.  But be forewarned, there are many of them).