The Safekeep

How about you? Look, I didn't read a lot in Q1, but I did have some goodies in the mix.

I think my favourite book from Q1 would be The Safe Keep by Yale van der Waarden.

I really had no idea what to expect from this book, but it was so beautifully written.

It was such a claustrophobic, feverish, paranoid, obsessive, sexy, heartbreaking book.

Yael van der Roeden is a writer and teacher who lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands.

Her debut novel, The Safekeep, is set in the Netherlands 15 years after the Second World War.

Isabelle has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place.

But all is upended when her brother Lewis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabelle's doorstep.

And since it won, it's sold 182,000 copies.

To put that into context, last year's winner, which was, uh, a book, a novel called The Safekeep, uh, sold 103,000 copies.

And in its first-

Wow