The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden

In 1961 Holland, Isabel, an extremely repressed and ignorant 30 year-old, seems destined to become a spinster. She lives alone in her long-dead mother’s country house, assisted every few days by a local girl. Her only social contact is with her two brothers, one a Lothario and the other a caustic gay who lives in France. Isabel is courted in a desultory fashion by a local farmer who apparently revolts her.  Isabel’s life is turned upside down when her older brother parks his current girlfriend, Eva, in her house for a month. The transformation of this obsessive, miserable, spinster who spends her days counting silverware and plates, to a loving compassionate human is a story of forbidden love.  It is love of Eva and the contents of her secret diary that cause the scales to fall from Isabel’s eyes and to question her childhood memories of the house her family moved into during the war.