The Safekeep

What a novel! I couldn’t put it down. The writing is taut, spare, and carries a tremendous amount of tension from beginning to end. This is excellent.

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Isabel overheard a fight where her mother whispered tightly and Hendrik sobbed at the top of his voice and Isabel closed her bedroom door and pushed her hands to her ears. When that didn’t help, she sat on her bed and stuffed the entire corner of the quilt into her mouth and then all she could hear was her own breathing.

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The three parts of this story have very distinct feelings to them. The first section gives us a vivid picture of the four main characters of the book. We think we know them and understand the situation clearly. But as we move through the second part, we feel we’re careening wildly down a bumpy path, unsure of where we’ll end up. The third part of this could have gone so many different ways, none of them obvious.

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By the time she was back in her car, the earliest of twilight was pulling the sky from a robin’s-egg blue to a blush. A wind rose, trees along the path gossiping with shaking leaves. They were so full this late spring. So proud.

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The ending the author chose forces us to understand what really happened. Not just on a personal and familial level, also on a national level. It’s heartbreaking. I was glad to know the hard truth of it.

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The house was a dark shape against the sky. Two proud firs. A single star came out under the waning moon; a beauty mark dotted under a coy eye. The hot season’s night rustled in the way that winter’s never did, bugs dry in the brush, things that had business in the dark.

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The story is extremely well-told, with hints in plain sight that we don’t see until we’re well into it. This book is about self-discovery, acceptance, love, second chances, humility, justice, and doing the right thing vs. doing the easy thing.

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I don’t understand why prizes are awarded for writing based on gender. Writing is a brain and heart thing; gender is irrelevant. The author of this is intersex, so which gender prize should they receive? Regardless, this debut novel won the Women's Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Well-deserved, in my opinion. This is an exceptional, devastating book.

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