***Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025***
An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge - for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan's Atonement.
It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. 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…
I realise I’m quite late to this party but, my god, what a book. It’s an incredible novel, delicate yet tough, and pitted with narrative landmines. It blew me away. I haven’t been as enthralled by a novel for a long time. I have immediately insisted that everyone I know reads it. - Maggie O'Farrell
Surprising, chilling, and electric. The Safekeep is a simply fantastic work of literature. - Alice Winn, bestselling author of IN MEMORIAM
The Safekeep is a dream of a novel — mesmerizing and shockingly good — it lulls you with the lyrical beauty of its words and then slams you awake with its raw passion and rage. Part silent scream, part breathless love story - Miranda Cowley Heller, bestselling author of THE PAPER PALACE
Haunting and exquisitely poignant - Claire Fuller
Moving, unnerving and deeply sexy - Tracy Chevalier, author of GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
The story is resolved in such a bold and tender way that it becomes not merely clever, but indelible - New York Times
An impressive debut; I already look forward to Van der Wouden’s next - Guardian
What a staggering book. Best thing I’ve read in quite a while - Patrick Radden Keefe
The Safekeep is a beautiful book, highly charged, tense, shocking and heartbreaking in equal measure.…One of those rare books that feels as if it’s been there all along, waiting to be given a voice. And what a voice this is. - Rachel Joyce
[A] mesmerizing debut....A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller - Bookpage
In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.
