Awards

Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize.

Reviews

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 - I was utterly blown away. -- 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

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

Tantalizing... fans of Patricia Highsmith and Ottesa Moshfegh's Eileen will find much to admire here.  Vulture

An astonishingly skillful debut, The Safekeep manages the rare trick of being both gripping and intimate. A twisting, elegant, intriguing story about the secrets we hide in our homes and hearts - and how it only takes one person to unlock the past. -- Joanna Quinn, bestselling author of THE WHALEBONE THEATRE

Elevated from a beautifully written lesbian romance to a shocking unmasking of the legacy of the Holocaust, this book will move and grip you. Times Summer Reads 

A beautifully realized book, nearly perfect, as van der Wouden quietly explores the intricate nuances of resentment-hued sibling dynamics, the discovery of desire (and the simultaneous discovery of self), queer relationships at a time when they went unspoken, and the legacy of war and what it might mean to have been complicit in its horrors.... A brilliant debut, as multifaceted as a gem. -- Starred Review, Kirkus

[A] remarkable debut novel. Observer

This thrilling debut novel weaves together an intense lesbian love affair with the hidden legacy of the Second World War... a razor-sharp, perfectly plotted debut novel... This book is worth your time and your patience. Van der Wouden has achieved something significant in The Safekeep, unearthing deeply buried pain and transforming it into a thrilling story. Sunday Times

Set a classic long, hot summer plot against the backdrop of 1960s Netherlands and you end up with thisclassy piece of storytelling.  Daily Mail Holiday Reading

Van der Wouden has created a classic plot and executes it perfectly. Daily Mail

[a] simmering, sexy work. Parade

Ms. Van Der Wouden knows how to wring real emotion from her readers, and The Safekeep is the uncommon book that one experiences in an almost physical way. Wall Street Journal

A strange, dream-like and troubling book, as haunting as the history it examines. Yael Van der Wouden is an extraordinarily powerful writer: it's hard to believe this can be her first book. -- Cressida Connolly, author of BAD RELATIONS and AFTER THE PARTY

A beautiful book. Incredibly well-observed, surprising, and deeply textured. -- Emma Healey, author of ELIZABETH IS MISSING

The Safekeep is thrilling: a riveting historical reconciliation and an impossible yet inevitable love story. Superbly wrought-serious, elegant, sexy, devastating. -- Julia May Jonas, author of VLADIMIR

This is a stealthy, simmering novel about complicity and the lies we live by -- Clare Pollard

This is an intimate novel, closely and brilliantly observed, with characters that while not likable are perhaps explainable...This is van der Wouten's first novel, and it's an accomplished debut. New York Journal of Books

Author description

Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher. She currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank", has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. The Safekeep is her debut novel and was acquired in hotly-contested nine-way auctions in both the UK and the US. Rights have sold in a further twelve countries.