Book recommendations
Reading list
An extract from The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
The Safekeep is longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024. Read an extract from the opening chapter here
It’s 15 years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season…
Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house her suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation – leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house – are what they seem.
Published in the UK by Viking.
Isabel found a broken piece of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd. Spring had brought a shock of frost, a week of wet snow, and now—at the lip of summer—the vegetable garden was shrinking into itself. The beans, the radishes, the cauliflower: browned and rotting. Isabel was on her knees, gloved hands and a stringed hat, removing the dying things. The shard nicked through her glove, pierced a little hole.
It wasn’t a wound and it didn’t bleed. Isabel took off her glove and stretched the skin of her palm tight, looking for a puncture. There was none, only a sting of pain that left quickly. Back at the house she washed the piece and held it in watery hands. Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken. It had once been a plate, which was part of a set—her mother’s favorite: the good chinaware, for holidays, for guests. When Mother was alive the set was kept in a glass vitrine in the dining room and no one was allowed to handle it. It had been years since her passing and the plates were still kept behind the closed doors, unused. On the rare occasion when Isabel’s brothers visited, Isabel would set the table using everyday plates and Hendrik would try to pry open the vitrine and say, “Isa, Isa, come now, what’s the point of having good things if you can’t touch them?” And Isabel would answer: “They are not for touching. They are for keeping.”
There was no explanation for the broken piece, for where it had come from and why it had been buried. None of Mother’s plates had ever gone missing. Isabel knew this and still she checked now. The set was as it had been left: a deck of plates, bowls, a little milk jug. In the middle of each one—three hares, chasing one another in a circle.
She took the piece with her on the train to Den Haag the next day, wrapped in brown paper. Hendrik’s car was parked outside the restaurant when she arrived, and he was at the wheel: windows down, smoking. Rubbing a thumb into his eye, looking like he was having a conversation with himself over something, a disagreement. His hair was longer than she liked it. She bent down and said, “Hello,” and he startled and knocked his elbow and said, “Jesus Christ, Isa.”
She got in the car next to him and kept her purse in her lap. He sighed out smoke and leaned over, kissed her three times— once on each cheek, and one more for good measure.
Yael van der Wouden
© Roosmarijn BroersenIsabel was on her knees, gloved hands and a stringed hat, removing the dying things. The shard nicked through her glove, pierced a little hole
“You’re early,” she said.
He said, “That’s a nice hat.”
She touched it. “Yes.” She’d worried over it, leaving the house. It was bigger than what she usually wore. It had a bright-green ribbon. “How are you, then?”
“Oh, you know.” He ashed his cigarette out the window, leaned back. “Sebastian’s been talking about going home.” Isabel touched her hat once more, her nape. She pushed a bobby pin further into place. Hendrik had called recently to tell her as much: Sebastian’s mother’s health taking a turn for the worse, Sebastian wanting to visit her. Sebastian wanting Hendrik to come with him. Isabel had not known what to say of it, and so she said nothing. And so she ignored the information and instead updated him about the state of the garden, about Neelke the maid and how she might be stealing things, about Johan’s disruptive visits that left her nonplussed, and about a recent car bill. Hendrik hung up quickly after that.
“I think I will have to go with him,” he continued, not looking at her. “I can’t let him go alone, I can’t—”
“I found this,” she interrupted, and took the wrapped package from her purse. Opened it for him, still in her palm. “Buried in the garden. Under one of the gourds.”
He considered her for a moment, confused. Then, with a quick blink, a breath, took the piece and inspected it. Turned it over. “One of Mother’s plates?”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“All right,” he said cautiously, and gave it back. On the other side of the street, a couple argued while they walked. The woman tried to hush the conversation, the man only raised his voice in response.
Isabel continued on a held breath: “I think Neelke—”
“Isabel.” Hendrik turned to face her now, cigarette still in hand. The space between them clouded with smoke. “There’s not going to be any maids left in the province if you keep on firing all of them with some imaginary ideas of—”
“Imaginary! I have been stolen from. They have—”
“Once,” he said. “That happened once, and she was so young, Isa, come on. Haven’t you been young?” She’d looked away from him and he ducked to catch her eye. He was putting on his funny voice. “Haven’t I, once?”
They were not old now. She was nearly thirty, and he was younger still. The youngest of them all. She wrapped the piece back into the paper and put it back in her purse.
“And besides,” he said. “It could’ve been in that ground a long time. Maybe Louis accidentally broke a plate once and panicked and—”
“Mother would’ve noticed,” Isabel said.
Hendrik wasn’t taking her seriously. “Well, I mean, who knows how the house was kept before we moved in.”
“What do you mean, before?”
Buy the book
We benefit financially from any purchases you make when using the ‘Buy the book’ links.
- By
- Yael van der Wouden
- Published by
- Viking
An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes – and the legacy of one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies
Features
