The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden has won the 2025 Women’s prize. It revisits a dark, under-explored chapter of Dutch history. It asks what happened to all the possessions that Jews who were forced to flee or were taken to camps during the second world war had to leave behind.
The trauma of this history hangs over the novel, a haunting buzz beneath this tale of a woman slowly losing control over her small and regimented world one summer in the early 1960s. That woman is Isabel, who lives alone in her sprawling family home in a rural area of the Netherlands.
The house is the centre of Isabel’s world and she spends most of her time obsessively keeping it in order, as her late mother would have wanted. To her, “a house is a precious thing”. Isabel is its possessive and careful caretaker, suspicious of anyone she perceives as interfering in her relationship with it.
