Isabel, the protagonist of Yael van der Wouden’s remarkable debut novel, has an excruciating habit, at moments of tension or distress, of pinching and twisting the skin on the back of her hand until it is raw and red. The repeated gesture sums up her plight as a figure seething with resentments and desires that she keeps, rigidly and violently, in check. Isabel lives in the house in which she grew up and in which her mother died, in a small Netherlandish town 15 years after the end of the second world war, obsessively cleaning and polishing the tableware and other objects that her mother loved while ruling tyrannically over the meek local girl who is her maid. When her debonair and womanising brother – who has been promised the house as his inheritance, making Isabel’s residence there tenuous and time-limited – leaves the country for several weeks, he brings his new girlfriend, the vivacious and flamboyant Eva, to live with Isabel, threatening to loosen or to sever the tight coils into which she has wound her existence.
