Women's prize for fiction reveals longlist ‘overflowing with compelling stories'
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Miranda July and Elizabeth Strout are among the writers longlisted for the 30th Women's prize for fiction.
Karen Jennings and Laila Lalami also appear on the list of 16 writers now in contention for the £30,000 prize.
Good Girl by Aria Aber (Bloomsbury)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)
Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches (Scotland Street Press)
Amma by Saraid de Silva (Weatherglass)
Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings (Holland House)
All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate)
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Bloomsbury)
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji (4th Estate)
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4th Estate)
Nesting by Roisín O'Donnell (Scribner)
A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike (Fig Tree)
Birding by Rose Ruane (Corsair)
The Artist by Lucy Steeds (John Murray)
'There were many lively debates on the judging panel over the final 16 books and it was a very close-run thing, but the list we have revealed today is overflowing with compelling stories, and writing that demonstrates passion, wit and empathy,' said writer and judging chair Kit de Waal.
Adichie was chosen for her much-anticipated fourth novel Dream Count, which tells the interlocking stories of four women navigating love, friendship, trauma, and social pressures to marry and have children. The Nigerian novelist previously won the prize in 2007 for Half of a Yellow Sun, which was also voted the 'winner of winners' in 2020. Her other two novels, Purple Hibiscus and Americanah, were shortlisted in 2004 and 2014 respectively.
Social expectations on women are also explored in July's second novel All Fours. The story sees a 45-year-old artist leave her husband and child at home to embark on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. Soon after setting off, she decides to check into a motel room instead, where she begins a sexless affair with a younger man.
Strout was selected for Tell Me Everything, in which characters from her previous novels, Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, meet. This is her fourth time on the longlist.
Lalami, who was longlisted in 2010 for Secret Son, was selected this time for The Dream Hotel, which explores the dangers of surveillance and algorithms. Her protagonist, Sara, is travelling home from a conference when she is pulled aside at the airport and told that data from her dreams suggests she is at risk of harming her husband, meaning she must be transferred to a 'retention centre'.
Many of this year's longlisted titles are set against a backdrop of politics, social change and war. In Jennings' book, Crooked Seeds, a white woman returns to her South African home and grapples with her brother's association with a pro-apartheid group. In Yael van der Wouden's debut novel The Safekeep, also shortlisted for the Booker prize, the treatment of Jews in the postwar Netherlands is explored. Another debut, Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, is a satire about an aid worker tasked with rehabilitating Isis women.
'These are important, far-reaching novels where brilliantly realised characters navigate the complexities of families and modern relationships, whilst pushing the boundaries placed around them,' said De Waal. 'It's a list that readers will devour and shows the echoes of world events on everyday lives as well as the power and brilliance of women writing today.'
Completing the longlist are Good Girl by Aria Aber, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches, Amma by Saraid de Silva, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Nesting by Roisín O'Donnell, A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike, Birding by Rose Ruane, and The Artist by Lucy Steeds.
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Alongside De Waal on this year's judging panel are the novelist Diana Evans, journalists Bryony Gordon and Deborah Joseph, and composer Amelia Warner.
A shortlist of six books will be announced on 2 April, while the winner will be revealed on 12 June, alongside the winner of the Women's prize for nonfiction – the longlist for which was unveiled last month.
To be eligible for this year's prize, books had to be published in the UK between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025.
Previous winners of the prize for fiction include Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Maggie O'Farrell. Last year, VV Ganeshananthan won the prize for Brotherless Night.
To browse all of the books on the Women's prize for fiction 2025 longlist visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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Edinburgh International Book Festival 2025: Fiction Highlights
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It's been 12 long years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie last published a novel, but the reviews for Dream Count are so glowing that it seems it's been worth the wait. One of the stars of festival's Front List, she will be appearing (19 August) on stage at the McEwan Hall, when an appropriately large audience will be able to find out why, according to one review, 'nothing less than the whole female experience' is within the scope of her new book. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie PIC:Ian McEwan (no relation) is a welcome repeat visitor to the festival, and has in the past discussed the difficulty of novelists tackling such a diffuse topic as climate change. On the festival's last day (24 August) Kirsty Wark may be able to draw him out on why he has returned to the subject in his next novel, What We Can Know, out in September. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ian McEwan PIC: Stuartfor BFI Also on the McEwan Hall stage, Maggie O'Farrell (15 August) will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of publishing her debut novel, After You'd Gone. Festival director Jenny Niven will chair the event – and might even get some of the skinny on the filming of Hamnet by Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao, starring Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as Anne Hathaway. Maggie O'Farrell PIC: Dasha Tenditna Back in the Futures Institute, Abdulrazak Gurnah will be discussing Theft, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 (10 August), while Australia's Michelle de Kretser – winner of her country's Stella award only a fortnight ago for Theory and Practice, her genre-bending 'fictional memoir' – makes her festival debut (16 August). The following day, our own genre-bender Ali Smith will be discussing her dystopian book Gliff, which de Krester herself has hailed as 'an irresistible invitation to rethink and reword our way to a truly brave new world'. What else? If you're looking for the best of Irish fiction, check out Eimear McBride (21 August) and Colum McCann (18 August); for French, see if Laurent Binet (19 August) can interest you in his epistolary detective story featuring half the artists in the Renaissance; work out if Daniel Kehlmann (9 August) deserves his reputation as the leading German novelist of his generation or why Javier Cercas (19 August) – highly regarded by our own Allan Massie – has long enjoyed similar status in Spain. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad I've only room to cram in a few more favourites, but it's impossible to leave out two great double-bills – Alan Hollinghurst appearing alongside Tash Aw (9 August) and Natasha Brown with Hari Kunzru (22 August) or last year's Man Booker winner Samantha Harvey (14 August). The festival's first Thursday is probably the best day to see Scottish writers, as Ewan Morrison, Doug Johnstone, Chris Brookmyre and Denise Mina are all there to talk about their latest novels (Brookmyre's 30th, Mina's 20th) at separate events.
The Guardian
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‘The risk was worth it': All Fours author Miranda July on sex, power and giving women permission to blow up their lives
When Miranda July's All Fours was published in May last year, it triggered what felt like both a spontaneous resistance movement and the sort of mania last experienced when the final Twilight book dropped, except this time for women in midlife rather than teenage girls. Two friends separately brought it to my house, like contraband dropped out of a biplane. Book groups hastily convened, strategically timed for when the men were out of the picture. The story opens with a 45-year-old woman about to take a road trip, a break from her husband and child and general domestic noise. She's intending to drive from LA to New York, but is derailed in the first half hour by a young guy, Davey, in a car hire place, to whom she is passionately attracted. The next several weeks pass in a lust so intense, so overpowering, so lusciously drawn, it's like a cross between ayahuasca and encephalitis. The narrator is subsumed by her obsession, and disappears her normal life. The road trip is a bust from the start, but the effort of breaking the spell and going home looks, for a long time, like way too much for the narrator, and when she finally does, to borrow from Leonard Cohen (perhaps describing a similar situation), she's somebody's mother but nobody's wife. The New York Times called it 'the first great perimenopause novel', which is incorrect – not because you could easily name 10 others, rather because what it ignited was not an honest heart-to-heart about hormones, but something far more radical. What if a woman just told the truth, about sex, monogamy, marriage, mortality, domesticity, friendship, the life of the mind? The disruption of norms would be so immense that you wouldn't, as a reader, necessarily need your circumstances or feelings to correspond to the author's for that to upend your life. One woman who nearly divorced her husband after reading it said: 'I think what I felt, which I think is what a lot of us feel, is permission to be undone.' All Fours was an immediate success. It spent nearly a year on the Indie Bestseller list. It was a finalist in the National Book Awards in the US, as well as being named on the best books lists, 2024, by the New York Times, the New Yorker, Time, the Washington Post, PBS, Oprah, Vogue and Vulture. Now, a year on, the paperback is coming out, and I'm talking to July as she waits to find out whether she has won the Women's prize . Our conversation, which would normally be part-retrospective – there's a funny bit in All Fours when she talks about the female artist's lifecycle: first 'hot young thing', then wilderness years, and a final spurt of attention before you die – is instead all about the reaction to this book. 'I wrote it as if it was OK – as if everyone knew what I was talking about,' July says, looking bluestockingy in round glasses, from her home in Echo Park, Los Angeles. 'As if you could make a joke about something shameful, as if we had all already talked about that thing. Even though we hadn't. So it was skipping a few steps, even to have humour about it. I was building on an internal world that I believed existed, not just in me.' Miranda July is 51, was born in Vermont to two writer parents, and has the ultimate boho CV – she said once that her last shitty job was at the age of 23, as a car-door-unlocker at Pop-A-Lock, a US chain of locksmiths, which makes her ability to make a living as, variously, a performance artist, a film-maker, a writer, almost mythical. She came to indie prominence with Me and You and Everyone We Know, her first full-length film, in 2005 – it won the best first feature at Cannes that year. It has the most endearing, infuriating sequence: someone buys a goldfish and accidentally drives off, having left it on top of his car. July, starring in the film because, realistically, she was the only person who could have, decides from inside her own car that the fish will certainly perish, and delivers an ode: 'I didn't know you, but I want you to know that you were loved.' Her voice was incredibly distinctive – she nailed all those universal feelings such as awkwardness, futility, delight, yet was as far as you could imagine from being an everywoman. There followed an exquisite book of short stories – No One Belongs Here More Than You – in 2007, and her first full-length novel, The First Bad Man, in 2015. Certainly, she always blurred the lines between herself and her protagonists. But When All Fours was published, it couldn't escape anyone's notice that July herself has a child, roughly the same age as the narrator's, and separated from her husband two years before the book's publication. Of course, it's always assumed that authors borrow from life, but this seemed like a different order of autobiographical fiction. Being honest about feelings, even destructive, primitive, contradictory, overwhelming ones, is daring enough, but marrying them to real-life events felt cataclysmic, which almost created a feedback loop. Readers felt the story was so audacious it had to be true. They were invested in the truth of it, to the extent that, during a Q&A after a reading, 'someone asked about Davey being a dancer, why was he?' says July. 'And I went through the whole thing of my process, why I came up with that, and I could just feel the room kind of deflate. They wanted him to be a real dancer.' 'My actual friends,' July says, her voice rising in mock outrage, 'they know that so much of this didn't happen. It definitely didn't happen the way it's written in the book. But even as I was talking to a writer friend, she said, 'I keep forgetting that you didn't just do what you did in the book. You had years of couples therapy and this long conversation with your husband, it's totally different.' And I was, like, 'Are you kidding me?' You have to hold that in your head. How is anyone else going to believe this isn't real, if my friends can't even remember?' What about her ex, though – Mike Mills, also a film-maker, Oscar-nominated in 2017 for his movie 20th Century Women? Did he mind, or was he fine with it? July looks at me sardonically. 'I don't think those are the only two conceivable feelings.' The pair met at Sundance film festival in 2005, both there with their first movies. 'So we met as artists, and we always talked about how there's this bubble that's sacred for each of us, you keep the bubbles separate. You know, you each get your own world, and you have your freedom within that. And so it's not like it's always easy, and for sure, there were parts of this that were hard. There's a part of it that was very personal for him – this is the mother of my child, we'll know each other for ever. And then there's the part that's a fellow artist. I remember him saying to me, 'I think you're at your best when you're closest to the bone as a writer.' So it's not great, it's not safe, but that was helpful to me to hear. I felt like the risk was worth it. The reward for not risking it seemed too modest.' A couple of months in from the publication of All Fours, everyone had a story about a woman who'd read it and blown her life up. But if you took a stroll through Goodreads, which is a kind of all-comers citizen book review site, something else stuck out: the people who one-starred it (about 5% of almost 140,000) didn't just hate it, there were actively angry with it. The rage was fascinating. It was as if they'd been slapped. Many were angry at how graphic it was (there's a famous, sexy scene with a tampon that would probably be a spoiler to describe). Commenters took umbrage. 'It would be great if I could read a book by a well-known female author who wasn't under the impression that descriptions of cutting matted hair from a dog's ass or running her hands under her lover's pee was 'original', 'sharp', or 'illuminating' writing,' wrote one. Many prefaced their scorn with the belief that women's bodies were brilliant territory for a writer – uncharted, tumultuous, mysterious – just not like this. This gave them the ick. More than that, though, they were angry with the narrator, and nowhere was the conflation of fiction and fact more complete; if she was narcissistic, self-involved, 'immature' then so was July. 'Yeah, I need to talk about that with someone,' July says, 'probably not you.' (I wish it could be me, but it sounds like she means a therapist.) Sometimes, it's just that they weren't expecting it – 'They thought it was going to be a beach read.' But more importantly, 'They're very sympathetic to the husband.' Of course, it's that – no question, he is betrayed by the narrator, not just with this brain fever emotional infidelity, but on an even more basic level; it's that he's so nice, so personable, so thoughtful, so empathetic, and yet … he's not enough. 'And I'm thinking, 'I created the husband, too! So he's also me!'' she says, laughing. This is possibly the most radical act of the book: not a woman getting divorced, but a woman leaving a Good Guy. The husband gets annoyed just once: when the narrator posts a photo of herself on Instagram, dancing suggestively. This section, which follows a period where the narrator works out in the gym and strives for a perfect physique, surprised me – it's such a mainstream thing to do. It's not a thousand miles from real life, either, as July also likes to uploads videos of herself shaking her insanely perfect, pretty much unshakeable ass (though fair play, the dances themselves are anything but mainstream). Today, July bristles a bit at the suggestion her character is in thrall to a beauty ideal when admiring her ass. 'No, she's been taking nude selfies, and then she's surprised to see, 'Hold on, it does look a little different down there.' I think that's what I was trying to capture.' Then she elaborates: 'If ever I have something to do with fashion, or frankly, even if I just get quite dressed up and I'm photographed because I enjoy that, I do have conversations with other prominent women writers that are like, 'I make sure that no one sees me having too good a time.' I think, for women, the measurement of what seriousness looks like is still masculine.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In November last year, July launched her Substack. It became a muster point for people who relished talking about the book, but an unusual number had also made a great change in their lives after reading it. What was interesting, when I interviewed some of them, was the sheer range of situations. There were readers who didn't need an LA literary novelist and performance artist to tell them they were allowed their own feelings – readers who were already queer or polyamorous or non-binary, who nevertheless found a new permission to just get out of whatever situation they were in, forgo the security of a relationship for something more authentic and exploratory. There were readers who were from incredibly conservative backgrounds. There were women who didn't leave their relationship, who simply left a job in which they felt no appreciation. There were women who changed the way they had sex. There were women who changed the way they related to their children, changed the time or attention they gave to friendships. We weren't looking at a divorce manual, in other words, but 'permission to be undone'. No wonder some people were angry. That is an incredibly dangerous licence, socially. A lot of things really rely on women who'll hold it together for others, regardless of their own feelings. July says that the scale of readers' responses has felt like more than an unusual wave of appreciation for a previously respected but niche artist and writer. 'I had this movie [Me and You and Everyone We Know], that was the big change for me,' she says. 'That experience was really about me, a new voice. All Fours is really about women. Reading and hearing about other people's stories – the sense of isolation, the shame that I had while I was writing the book, it's all been completely inverted.' This is one of the reasons 'perimenopause novel' irks, as a thumbnail – situating these explosive feelings hormonally is just another way to say these feelings will pass, so don't matter. But July is relaxed about that. 'There have been different phases of shame and fear while I'm writing – there was more shame when I was younger. Then I got to the perimenopause and that was the last thing I wanted to be associated with. All the time I was writing, I was just thinking, 'Why am I doing this? I can't stop myself.'' The menopause conversation is much more developed in the UK than the US, she says, where nobody talks about it. 'You could have a whole relationship with your gynaecologist and really not have it come up. Or you could say, 'I have these symptoms,' and they'd say, 'If you're suicidal, you can take hormones, but otherwise just ride it out.' And that's in LA!' It makes me think of all the other ways in which women in the US are peculiarly under-emancipated – not the recent, terrifying anti-abortion legislation, but the bread-and-butter stuff, such as the lack of significant maternity leave; does that feel connected? 'I think it's very intertwined with the healthcare system. We just don't have reliable healthcare, period. So menopause is a luxury problem.' She notes, wryly, that 'we don't actually have a problem with rich, aspirational women' as protagonists, they just can't be dissatisfied. It's funny: on a Zoom she looks younger than her age, but not artificially so, or massively groomed; but in public, I've always found her stunning appearance incongruous, like, how can this woman feel out of place? July's The First Bad Man is 10 years old now, and even though it is mainly powered by sexual fantasies, they are so extravagantly weird that, when I read it, I didn't even realise it was meant to be erotic. (That was partly context – literary erotic fiction wasn't really a thing, then. You were either a Fifty Shades reader or you read grown-up stuff.) It wasn't until July spoke at a book festival and described how she was masturbating so much while working on the book that her writer-friend said she had to sublimate, the way athletes do, or she was never going to finish it. Which was news to the audience just because, you know, who's ever heard 'I was masturbating … ' at a book festival? Technically, All Fours is a work of erotic fiction, which has a definition: that the sex doesn't just happen, the characters are advanced by it. At the same time, it's not a sex-beach-read, because that's not July's style. 'Sometimes I pick up a book at the top of the bestseller lists, just to understand what's going on,' she says. 'I'm reading a romcom called Funny Story. I was shocked by how graphic it is … I don't think I'm prudish, I was a prostitute [shorthand for promiscuous, not literally a sex worker] at times in my life.' All Fours aims to do something different. 'The joy of it, for me, was writing a thing I hadn't seen written about sex, either because what constituted sex was new, or because nobody had ever described, like, a woman who takes a long time to come; the thoughts of the other person: is this a fool's errand? Will I be able to do this? It was just really funny to me: 'Tell me if you need a vibrator, tell me if I'm just gonna keep going at this. You know, if it's humanly possible.'' Yet this definitely isn't slapstick sex; it's meant, and felt. The narrator and her friend make a rigid distinction between mind-rooted fuckers and body-rooted fuckers – mind-fuckers are imagining a scene as they have sex (in one memorable description between the narrator and her husband, she says it's like she stuck a giant TV to his head); body-fuckers are absolutely engrossed in the sensations of the body, their mind is nowhere – and there's a memorable scene for that, too. What was the reason, creatively, that the narrator and Davey never have sex? 'The point was to build it to this place where you felt like those were the only two options: she's either going to have sex or she's going to go home. I wanted to use all that built-up energy, that obsessive loop, so another way of thinking would present itself. That playing field, while it's completely addictive to read about – and to live, frankly – is ultimately quite small. But it can be transformative, it can push you into the next area of your life. If the end result is that you fuck Davey, you might not get that birth of complexity.' Then she says the most surprisingly romantic thing. 'When someone sees you, in a particular way, and that part of your soul that hasn't really been seen is seen, it won't go back into the box. And that's a big problem, because your life isn't built for it to come out of the box.' We speak before July travels to the UK for the Women's prize. 'Sometimes people will tip you off that you're not gonna win. I've been looking for that email, and haven't had it yet. But the important thing about this book is what it's done to the conversation, for the culture. I don't know if that's the thing literary prizes are for.' ( In the end, she lost out to Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden.) It must feel strange and vulnerable, at this moment, to be an author who stands for – maybe not everything, but a huge amount of things that the US government absolutely cannot tolerate, whether that's female emancipation or sexual and gender fluidity. 'I tend to think the people who are most vulnerable to this are not so visible. What's the deal with my neighbours? I've known them for 20 years, but I don't know who's here legally, why would I know their business? Who's gonna notice if two of the people in that house are gone?' But it does touch her personally, and not just as a neighbour. 'It's really hard to get a grip on,' she says sadly. 'Whether the most extreme takes are actually the most clear-eyed. Whether the people who are moving [abroad] have it right. I'm trying to figure that out right now.' Unlike her narrator, July did make it to New York, last week, where she entertained her friends in her hotel room (which will, if you've read it, remind you a lot of All Fours). This is how she described the experience on her Substack: 'Two of my visiting friends were my age and both of them, in different ways, spoke about looking older, the hardness of that … One friend and I showed each other our thighs in the light to make sure the other one really saw our cellulite. I told her the truth: I had assumed hers was much more extreme because of how she had spoken about it over the years. For years, I had placed her in a different category from myself, cellulite-wise.' And that's July – the political, the personal, the public, the intimate, the things you're not supposed to think about if you want to be taken seriously or thought of as truthful, all with a voice that's entirely relatable yet completely idiosyncratic. All Fours is out now in paperback (Canongate Books). To support the Guardian, order your copy from Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
Women's prize winner Yael van der Wouden: ‘It's heartbreaking to see so much hatred towards queer people'
It has been a dramatic couple of years for 37-year-old Dutch author Yael van der Wouden: her first novel, The Safekeep, a love story that deals with the legacy of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, was the focus of a frenzied bidding war and shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. Last night it won the Women's prize for fiction. 'I wrote this book from a place of hopelessness,' she says when we meet. 'I was looking for a ray of sunshine.' This morning in London the sun is blazing. She could never have expected that her novel would see off shortlisted authors including Miranda July (of whose work she is a big fan) and Elizabeth Strout. Warm and open, the author is shorter than I expected. Coming as she does from a country of tall people, as she jokes: 'I have tall energy.' She has great energy, despite several glasses of champagne last night and only a few hours' sleep. On her shoulder is a tattoo of a hare – an important symbol in the novel – which she had done after completing the book. In her tearful acceptance speech, Van der Wouden told the audience that when she hit puberty: 'all at once, my girlhood became an uncertain fact.' The fact that she is hormonally intersex 'was a huge part of my 20s, and then I got the healthcare that I needed … I am receiving truly the greatest honour of my life as a woman, presenting to you as a woman and accepting this Women's prize and that is because of every single trans person who's fought for healthcare, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders.' It was the first time she has spoken about it publicly. Not to have done so she tells me, 'wouldn't have been me. I had my five minutes on stage and I figured what better moment to share something that I care about? It's heartbreaking to see so much hatred toward trans identities, queer identities.' Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep is a tense psychological thriller and tender love story between two very different women, Isabel and Eva. It is a story of dispossession and self-discovery, national and intimate secrets and shame. 'This is a novel about a woman who is obsessed with a house, and then a stranger comes and upends her life,' the author says. Isabel is gentile, Eva is Jewish. To say much more would be to give away clues in a narrative that unfolds in a series of jagged revelations, like the shards of broken china Isabel cherishes, that come together to make a devastating and beautiful whole. The idea for the novel came to her 'as a parting gift' in a car on the way to one of the funerals of her Dutch grandparents, who died within days of each other in 2021. 'It came from a place of trying to escape grief,' she says. 'I was trying to find distraction in my own head, as I've done since I was a kid.' Born in Israel in 1987 to a Jewish mother of Romanian and Bulgarian heritage and a Dutch father, Van der Wouden, who describes herself as a 'Dutch-Israeli mixed-bag-diaspora child', spent her first 10 years in Ramat Gan, a city just east of Tel Aviv. She is careful not to talk about her childhood through what she calls 'a pink cloud' of nostalgia because of her vehement opposition to the Israel-Gaza war – she would like to see 'a ceasefire with immediate aid'. Both her parents were animators (her father created an Israeli version of Sesame Street) and while she and her two younger sisters were encouraged to engage with all art forms, she was not at all bookish. It wasn't until the family moved to the Netherlands when she was 10 that Van der Wouden discovered books – with Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden being a particular favourite. But she also discovered antisemitism, while living with her grandparents in a house in the forest. Though that home is still her 'happy place', going from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv to 'being the only Jew in the village' wasn't easy. To her new Dutch classmates she resembled Anne Frank. Now, she has no time for the rhetoric of tolerance. 'I think that's a terrible word, because tolerance is putting up with somebody. I want to be desired. I want to be loved. Rather than writing a story about tolerance, I wanted to write a story about love in the aftermath of war.' With Isabel, she created a character who goes from prejudice and repulsion to desire. There is a lot (an entire chapter) of sex in the novel. She laughs. 'My goal was to imbue the whole book with a sense of tension, and that tension is erotic.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion She deliberately chose the perspective of Isabel rather than Eva, so as not just to tell the victim's story. 'There's also many parts of perpetrator within me, within my history,' she says. Van der Wouden had never read a novel that explored what she calls 'the psyche of quiet complicity'. Through Isabel she wanted to show that 'complicity comes from small and uninteresting acts of dismissal', and it is something of which we are all guilty. 'It's part of the human experience. The question is, how do we deal with knowing that we looked away from something terrible, how do we then move forward?' The emotional power of the novel rests on the way in which Isabel reveals herself to be someone completely different, even to herself. 'What's like me,' Isabel says to her brother. 'There's no such thing. Like me.' This speaks to Van der Wouden's personal experience. 'We don't leave this life in the same bodies were born into, we are always under flux,' she says. 'This is not to say that gender and sexuality is a choice followed by change, but rather that change is an inherent part of life.' On the question of the supreme court ruling on gender rights, she adds: 'To subject that to law feels baffling to me, especially as it is accompanied by legal, verbal and physical violence.' Much of The Safekeep was written during lockdown in Utrecht, where she had an attic apartment overlooking the canal. 'A beautiful golden cage,' she says. She now lives half an hour away in Rotterdam, where she is thrilled to have a garden. She has already completed the first draft of a second novel set in a fishing village in the Netherlands in 1929. Her greatest hope for the novel as it goes on to find a bigger audience, 'if this isn't too saccharine,' she says apologetically, 'is, in fact, hope.'
