Welcome to the books that shaped me - a Good Housekeeping series in which authors talk us through the reads that stand out for them. This week, we're hearing from Yael van der Wouden, who recently won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025 with her novel The Safekeep.
Yael is a writer and teacher who lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. The Safekeep is her debut novel and was acquired in hotly-contested nine-way auctions in both the UK and the US.
The impact books have had on you as a person and an author...
It’s difficult to even begin to answer this question: I don’t know who I would’ve been without books! I started reading relatively late in comparison with most bookish kids—I was around eleven, and freshly new in a new country, a new school, and books (previously considered by me as an extremely boring pastime) became an escape and a comfort. Later, as a teen, they allowed me to learn in a way that school didn’t. I was quite bad at sitting down at memorising information ad hoc, but once it was put in narrative form? I inhaled it, remembered it for years, can still regurgitate random bits of information from a novel I read once at fifteen. Humans are inherently narrative creatures and we always try to find order in chaos and, for me, the way to find order was always through literature. As an author, everything that I know, I’ve learnt through books. There wouldn’t be author Yael without reader Yael.
The childhood book that has stayed with me...
It has to be The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson-Burnett – another complicated book about a grand home full of secrets. When I first read it I was a little girl living with her grandparents in a house in the forest, where I had no friends, there were no children around and there was very little to do. So I found an echo reading this book that I hadn’t found in any piece of writing before. And when I was older I was able to revisit this book through the lens of postcolonial theory, and be equally fascinated by the construction of nostalgia in it—see it as a part of a wider creation of a national narrative of belonging, where the colony is a place of disorder and illness, and the home country a place of order and recovery. I got to revisit my own relationship to it in relation to my own colonial history and heritage as an Israeli woman and a Dutch woman. And then in writing my own book, I could return to it once again as a formative text: a story set in a grand, big house, contending with its histories of complicity.
My favourite book of all time...
This changes every day, depending on my mood and the weather! In the last few years I’ve been holding Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting very close to my heart as a novel that made me feel everything and anything I could possibly want (or not want!) to feel, and I’m fascinated by that—by the power it holds. Before I read this novel, I didn’t know any of these characters, these people, they didn’t matter to me. Now someone just has to say the name ‘Imelda’ and I fall down. That turnaround, to go from being a stranger to a book to carrying with you all the time, and the speed of that turnover is as quick as it takes you to read the novel—that’s fascinating to me. It’s a bit like U-hauling with someone you just met through Bumble. That’s the The Bee Sting for me, perfect in the way that it has played right into my long-standing conviction that there is no greater reading experience than sympathy, than growing to love someone who you didn’t love before. Every part in that novel does exactly that: you start reading about someone who you think will annoy you, and you end up devoted to them.
The book I wish I'd written...
I just finished Stag Dance by the brilliant Torrey Peters, and I was honestly upended by it for days. It made me put my own current project down and rethink the core of it, of what it was trying to say. Especially the titular story in Stag Dance was unlike anything I’d ever read and I finished it and thought, this is a perfect story. The character building being pushed forward by the world building, the romance being the romance of recognition, of hating the other in hating the self—the language, the symbolism, the thematics. I want it a million times over. I want it as a movie, I want it as a play, I want it in as many ways I can consume.
The book I wish everyone would read...
A book that I adored and that I wish would get a lot more recognition: Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas, a novel about friendship and obsession and how we don’t always understand desire when it comes to us—desire as wanting to be wanted as we are versus desire as wanting to be someone else. It’s a book that’s so awkwardly funny and kind and heartbreaking and it’s about identity. Right now, the voices that demand that identity be a singular, static thing are loud and terrifying. Transphobia is rampant and it’s noxious and it tells us a lie: that bodies come in binaries. That bodies, if left to their own accord, remain unchanged. That bodies hold truths whereas the soul is false.
It’s good for me, personally, and I believe it might be good for many people to continue reading novels that remind us that change is inherent to life, that our sense of self is complicated and confusing and never singular, and that the body is an unruly trickster, whether you like it or not. Idlewild was one of those novels that offered an abundance of thoughts and no neat conclusion. It’s also about overly intense teen friendships, Shakespeare, quakers, and 2002 LiveJournal culture. Like I said, layered!
The book thast got me through a tough time...
I’m an avid Austen re-visitor! What’s more comforting than seeing the master do it perfectly? Than feeling grand emotions in a contained and safe manner because you already know how it’ll end—happily? There was a long period when I was still single where I was simply bored of not being in love. I yearned, but not for anyone in particular, but for yearning itself. The Austens are perfect companion for that. A fantastic channel for big feelings when they have nowhere to go and no-one to receive them.
The book that uplifts me...
I would say it’s less specific books that uplift me and more the privilege of getting to read my friends’ manuscripts in their early stages. It’s the joy of getting to see the magic of the process as it’s happening, and also, because they’re my friends, I know how their curiosity works—in what ways they want to see their characters suffer or succeed or long for another. It’s like living with a professional cook who likes exactly the same flavours you like, and they let you stand in the kitchen as they cook and ask them questions. When my friend Alice Winn let me read her at-the-time unpublished manuscript In Memoriam, back at the heart of lockdown in the summer of 2020, I had the unparalleled joy of disappearing into it for three days and resurfacing—sleep-deprived and out of my mind—and then actually getting to talk to her about it! It was thrilling.
The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wooden is out now in paperback
