Dutch novelist Yael van der Wouden’s debut, The Safekeep, is a claustrophobic, festering novel set in 1960s’ Netherlands, a country still scorched by Nazi occupation a decade and a half earlier. The story sets out to be an account of an antisocial young woman living in her deceased mother’s house, attended regularly by her two dissimilar brothers. When a brother’s girlfriend is dumped to live temporarily in the house, the story expands to one of lust and longing, and then, unexpectedly, veers into Holocaust reckoning. The author has fashioned a deeply intimate examination of the protagonist, written in dramatic prose, and her plotting is assuredly tight. The florid love affair at the heart of the book slows down the core revelations but overall, The Safekeep is a fiery, poised novel.
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