The Safekeep

Isabel lives alone in her late mother's house in rural Overijssel, in a Netherlands fifteen years past the war and determined to say nothing about it. She keeps the house like a reliquary: counting the silver spoons, cataloguing the hairline cracks in her mother's plates, suspecting the maid of theft, holding her two brothers at the distance of monthly dinners. She is brittle, cold and forensically observed, and the novel's first pleasure is how completely van der Wouden makes the reader live inside a woman this armoured.

Then her feckless brother Louis deposits his latest girlfriend for the summer: Eva, loud where Isabel is silent, careless with objects, wrong in every way that matters, and impossible to stop watching. Locked in the house together through a hot rural summer, surveillance curdles into obsession and obsession into an affair, written with a directness that made the book's reputation, and Isabel's rigidity reveals itself as a lifetime of appetite under lock.

But things keep going missing, and Eva keeps a notebook, and the novel's last act springs the trap it has been building in plain sight: the question of how a Dutch family came to own this particular house in 1944, what happened to the people whose spoons Isabel has been counting, and what Eva is to them. The reveal reorders every earlier chapter, and the ending offers something rarer in restitution stories than justice: an actual reckoning, paid in person.

Around two hundred and sixty pages, tense, spare and precisely built.

Best for readers who want a love story, a moral thriller and a national accusation folded into one summer, with a twist that plays completely fair.