This year’s winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize, recently announced, is The Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, which competed with a remarkable shortlist of powerful women’s stories—Good Girl by Aria Aber, All Fours by Miranda July, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis.

While it is not necessary that a novel by a female writer be about women, The Safekeep wraps a complex story about history, memory, loss, loneliness, obsession and twisted revenge around the intense love-hate story between two women.

The book is set in the Dutch province of Overijssel in the early 1960s, a few years after the end of World War II. Isabel, a woman in her thirties, lives in a large country house, with just a maid to help with domestic chores. She vaguely remembers moving to this house as a child, with her mother and two brothers.

Now Hendrik lives in the city with his male lover; Louis keeps changing his girlfriends so often that his family cannot keep track of them. Their uncle, Karel, had bought the house and has willed it to Louis so that he can live there in the future with his family. It is just assumed that Isabel will marry and leave to live with her husband.

At the back of Isabel’s mind there is always a lurking........

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