Amanda

Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. Louis disturbs her meticulous isolation when he asks her to host Eva, his lover, for the summer while he is away. Isabel grudgingly agrees. Eva arrives there with a laid-back sense of belonging that perturbs Isabel from the beginning.

There is not an instantaneous connection here. There is instead conflict—social, emotional, territorial. Gradually, their relationship evolves. Their tense cohabitation gains an edge of intimacy, one that stays murky as the story progresses. What starts out as apprehension gradually becomes fascination, then something even more charged and more devastating. Their dynamic is never entirely mutual, never safe, and never free of the past.

Van der Wouden writes tension with elegant precision—sexual, definitely, but also psychological and historical. The past exerts a real pressure here, acting as more than just a backdrop. The book takes place in a nation that is still writing its postwar history, conveniently forgetting collaboration but remembering gallantry. The Safekeep questions what people choose to live with in the aftermath.

With a consistent smouldering tone, the language is restrained and lyrical. Van der Wouden does not over-explain. Isabel keeps her cards close to her chest, and some readers may find her emotional opacity difficult at first: she’s not particularly likeable, but she feels real and understandable. This book calls on its readers to sit with discomfort and observe what isn’t said aloud. This narrative is one about silence as a means of survival—and complicity.

Though Isabel and Eva reject any neat categories, their relationship is crucial. Their closeness is spun with unresolved anguish, cold secrets, and a distinct disparity in power. It is not a conventional romance, but it does explore the intersection of fear and desire. Van der Wouden lets ambiguity handle the heavy work; nothing is simple and nobody is innocent.

Late in the book, there is a revelation of the sort that I treasure. It corrodes, rather than explodes. It clarifies the characters and their decisions, thereby enhancing the enormity of what the book has been developing all along. Van der Wouden seems far more fascinated with consequences than in drama for its own sake.

Readers sensitive to issues of complicity, betrayal, or the silent violences we sometimes inherit—emotional, familial, or historical—may want to proceed carefully. This book explores how long the plainly visible can remain unseen, as well as how often comfort can be preserved only at someone else’s expense.

The Safekeep‘s lack of tidy resolution is one of its most remarkable aspects. It asks a lot: tolerance of uncertainty, patience, and attention. It honours those things with a narrative that sticks with you. It’s about memory, power, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to cope with what we can’t face.

This will probably appeal if you want something slow, suspenseful, psychologically personal, and morally complicated. If you want lovable characters or closure, this may not be the best option. The Safekeep offers fiction that dares to challenge.

Originally written for The Lesbrary: https://lesbrary.com/the-safekeep-by-yael-van-der-wouden-review/

The Atlantic—salt-bitten and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that tidal metronome, letting sentences drift eastward onto Uruguay’s raw ocean edge. Some clauses stretch out like the low-tide flats while others are cast out to sea, where they leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps. Reading it, I heard the waves breaking in my own ribs: the prose brims with wind-whipped grit yet slips into the lyrical just as easily. What makes the novel sing isn’t only its technical poise—those long, wave-tossed cadences against staccato spray—it’s the way each page insists that queer joy can be both intimate and revolutionary all at once. The book hands you contraband tenderness the way a friend might pass you a match in a blackout: casual and necessary.

Flaca and Romina start out planning together in a cramped bedroom, knowing that five women in one place would be more than a sleepover—it’d be an outlawed assembly. Under the junta, five was the magic number that turned friendship into “conspiracy” on paper; each of them loving other women turned that danger electric. Yet, somehow, these central five dared it anyway—building a hidden world out of laughter, cigarettes, and midnight whispers, where the threat of prison and worse only thickened the bond. In this story resistance is brewed, not broadcast: a dented cuia of maté—leaves gathered where Guaraní caretakers still tend the riverbank—circles clockwise. Sip, pass, and breathe even as a patrol spotlight slices the darkness and the slur “cantoras” scuffs over the sand. De Robertis shows us that fear can hone our wit without halting it. Laughter, barbed and buoyant, is often the brightest armour.

Time whips back like a boomerang tide—just when you think you’ve skipped to safety… splash! Yeah, it’s the same water, but it’s a new decade as we step into 2013. Pepe Mujica’s in the big chair (when he’s not chauffeuring himself in his famously scruffy VW Beetle), and Uruguay has just signed the dotted line on marriage equality. The news comes by phone—tidy and inconclusive—while a cat, collected as any revolution, lounges on a battered suitcase kept by the door, just in case. Many of us today are being reminded what these characters clearly remember: passports expire, sure—but promises? They can curdle faster than the milk lounging in my fridge door.

Maté gurgles. Salt gusts. A battered radio pirates forecasts, figures, decrees; its twitching aerial mimics river reeds rehearsing rebellion. Even static turns polyphonic, a stammering choir refusing silence as songs, once buried, sing back to life—not ghosts, but grounded voltage. When the syntax of this story snakes, it does so while it mirrors the covert paths these women trace. Every stylistic swerve moonlights as both the map and the territory. Survival is a collective thing, and language—mocked or mumbled—cuts loopholes into the law.

By the last page, reciprocity resounds. Jokes, alarms, and hand-me-down radios tug tomorrows toward the shore, hauling future listeners with them. The sand remembers older pacts than roadside checkpoints, and the sea holds its impartial elegy. Cantoras tunes us into a frequency that outruns the static, asks us to lean close, then leaves us listening for the next unruly voice.

Read this book if you want language to reroute statutes, if you believe a gourd can double as megaphone, if you crave a tale where fear and wit clasp elbows and stand together. Skip it only if you need your sentences tamer and your rivers clearer. Otherwise, pour whatever passes for decent yerba maté where you live, crack open the battered paperback, and tune your radio’s dial—I’ll meet you in the static.

The Archer moves with the methodical, recurring, and emotionally controlled intensity of mastered movement. In this debut novel, Shruti Swamy resists spectacle in favour of scrutiny—of the body, of memory, and of the hidden labour of becoming someone you were assured you couldn't be.

Set in mid-century Bombay, The Archer follows Vidya, a girl drawn to kathak dancing by yearnings she cannot name—not only for performance but also for isolation, self-mastery, and liberation. The limiting choreography of daughterhood shapes her life, while her aspiration alters every space she moves through. The elegant minimalism of Swamy's work—short, precise lines that never strain for impact—is remarkable. The book develops not through sudden revelation, but through the precise and calculated repetition of choices that are returned, refused, and ultimately made once again.

Although kathak is not in my cultural background, the book carefully and curiously drew me towards it. Arriving unversed as I did, aware of my distance, made me appreciate Swamy not over-explaining. She respects the tradition rather than making an exhibit of it. Here, kathak is form and philosophy rather than merely metaphor. Its rhythms resound in the pace of the book: stillness, repetition, variation, and breath. The process left me with a growing curiosity about how the dance lives in the history it embodies.

Oftentimes, the emotional and narrative framework of The Archer is an extension of that form. This book doesn't have a linear plot in the conventional sense, but there is no doubt that there's an important story here. The narrative circles back on itself, stressing internal transformations before outside events. This framework fosters immersion but also runs the risk of stasis; some sections serve as echoes of past ones without clearly expanding on them, and some emotional beats seem to land the same way more than once. Readers seeking a strong narrative force could find themselves adrift.

In particular, the restraint of the book might calcify into detachment for some readers. Swamy's approach is all about control: about what is left unsaid and what is all but unseen. This powerful aesthetic choice also sometimes leaves Vidya feeling artistically remote, with her inner existence more mapped out than embodied. We're sometimes shown what she does with beautiful precision, often with the reason why, but at times it's hard to echo her feelings in the moment. Some key scenes felt detached, as if we were watching from behind glass.

A similar flattening effect also applies to secondary characters, meaning figures like Manorama, Vidya's mentor and the most emotionally charged presence in the novel, can feel more like symbols than fully formed people. The roles they play are clear and crucial—teacher, foil, or obstacle—but their texture can get lost in the exacting form of the prose. Focussing solely on Vidya's viewpoint is practical and serves as an effective storytelling technique, yet it diminishes the emotional depth of her relationships.

Despite any criticism around its austerity and distance, The Archer thrums with composed tension, especially around the idea of desire. Though it never states it clearly, the book is deeply queer in this regard. Vidya's relationship with Manorama is filled with both reverence and longing, and her decision to forego marriage and motherhood appears to be more an active act of refusal than one of hesitation. Here, the queerness is subtextual, even spectral, but manifestly present in how attention flows between the women and how their intimacy alters their sense of self. It may not be clearly romantic or even completely aware of its existence, but it is absolutely there.

Swamy writes with the exactitude of a dancer; no unnecessary effort or strain. Though they are sparse, her sentences are effective. She depends on the stillness within them and puts her trust in the reader's efforts to listen closely. By means of those efforts it gives something rarer than the emotional catharsis it often calculatedly withholds: the sensation that the book was carefully constructed, not merely written.

The ending does not so much resolve everything as it brings about a shift in Vidya's life. The decisions she makes seem neither sad nor triumphant, just important. We are left with a sense of movement—direction without destination and a life starting on it own terms.

The Archer is not an overly generous book, nor a kind one. Still, it is exacting, and its exactness has a special sort of appeal. For readers with a predisposition toward interiority, self-discipline, and the complexity of queer self-invention, it provides something even more lasting: not a revelation, but a resonance

I snagged Fatima Daas’s The Last One because someone—I forget both where and who—mentioned it had won France’s Prix de Flore. Look, I’ll admit it, I’m a magpie for any book that makes the French literary crowd uncomfortable enough to shower it with accolades.

What blindsided me? Three hours hunched over the book in my café’s corner, forgotten coffee cooling while I devoured what felt like diary/therapy notes/novel all at once. Because that’s the thing—this is all and none of those. Daas scripts autofiction like someone who has cracked a certain code: that some truths can only spill out when form itself is broken. I’ll disclaim up front—there are aspects of her experience I can witness but never walk through, situations I can hear but not fully parse. While I may not understand her specific experience of straddling multiple worlds, I am familiar with mine, and I recognise a sense of sisterhood within the pain.

Daas scripts this impossibility in story-shards that sprinkled through a disjointed timeline—it’s daring enough to earn France’s Prix de Flore and brave enough to refuse a resolution. “My name is Fatima Daas.” Forty times this refrain returns—forty! It’s a name twin—given to both writer and written, in a way that triggers vertigo: what’s testimony, what’s invention? The echo resonates less like certainty and more like someone studying their own cracked mirror, checking her reflection, waiting for the pieces to find a new form.

The book’s throughline seems to mirror the psyche of its subject. It’s full of segments that resist tidy assembly and a formal—or informal—approach that echoes Marguerite Duras in its refusal of conventional narrative coherence. Chapters are either compressed into single breaths or expanded into run-on confessions. In therapy sessions (rendered in second person, that self-distancing grammar of dissociation), Fatima explains she is “several women”—the dutiful daughter kneeling for prayer, the lover stealing kisses in dim-lit back-room bars, and the writer whose words splinter under the weight of what cannot be reconciled. When she prostrates herself at dawn while Nina sleeps unknowing in their bed, the scene splits like an egg—the yolk of devotion, the white of desire, and the shell of silence keeping them separate even as they share sheets and sink water.

Between the housing projects of Clichy-sous-Bois and Paris’s literary salons stretches a distance no metro map measures—not just the RER B’s forty-minute journey but the weight of 2005’s fires that began on those streets, marking who belongs and who burns. The author captures this cartographic contradiction through code-switching that falters between its tongues. French phrases get draped with Arabic that the narrator wears like borrowed finery. These gaps persist, even filtered through the English translation, as if each untranslated word is a walled garden the narrator can’t find the gate of.

Her mother’s hands fold laundry with the mechanical precision of someone who has learnt that order is the only balm poverty permits. Fatima writes in the same cafes where intellectuals dissect the diaspora, having never calculated its daily algebra: How many lies buy one fact? How much shame purchases passage? How many mispronounced syllables until silence seems safer?

Queerness and faith occupy the same body, twin embryos competing for space, nutrients, and survival. Neither wins. Daas grants neither one a victory—a refusal that disrupts French literary culture’s appetite for clear moral positions, its republican insistence on singular identity. She writes of weariness instead. No, that’s not quite right—she writes of the cost, the weight of permanent revolution against oneself: masturbating then making ablutions, each ritual gesture rendered with startling specificity that makes sacred practice legible without diminishing its mystery; memorising Quranic verses while planning escape routes from family dinners where girlfriends cannot be named.

The prose embodies this paradox: when Fatima finally, damningly, introduces the wrong person as “my friend”, the words arrive pre-emptively cloaked in their own inadequacy. Longing here is a telegram sent in a dead language—perfectly formed, utterly un-understandable. Daas joins a small but vital tradition of queer Muslim writers who refuse to choose between sexuality and spirituality—a lineage especially resonant for anyone who knows the fatigue of defending multiple marginalised identities. It’s not my lineage, but I’m grateful for the chance for this glimpse into it.

Perhaps most striking is how Daas builds on North African traditions of disrupted narrative and linguistic resistance. The narrator remains gloriously, necessarily unfinished. The narrator once again fails the driving test. A novel abandoned mid-sentence, like all the others before it. Even the book’s title suggests both finality and ongoingness—shifting from the French La petite dernière (the youngest daughter) to The Last One in English, the translation opening existential questions that the original rooted in birth order. A last attempt at wholeness? The last lie before candour? The last woman she’ll try to be before accepting she must be all of them, none of them, or the spaces between them?

There are books that don't just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. Water-strong and water-strange, these poems sweep readers into depths beyond the limits of language.

I read with breath caught beneath my ribs, snagged in the space between reach and retreat. What mutters in the marrow? What had I lost before I could give it a name? Not absence as an idea but absence as an anatomical fact: the hollow where a tooth was pulled, the socket still raw. Diaz's landscapes aren't metaphor—they're anatomy. Sacred cartographies stitched into tendons, breath drawn from basins and ranges, each word a stone burnished by mouths that would not forget.

Diaz writes the body the way a flash flood writes a canyon—with sudden force, patient aftermath, and sediment settling into curves. It's erosion made evident and passion worn down to a shine. Her poems render desire not as ornament but architecture. Desire constructs its own scaffolding. Touch refuses erasure. Each line spills past its margins, ignoring the usual fences. Her syntax sprawls like an arroyo after a storm—necessary, alive. Every poem carries tension at its seam: beauty snagged on brutality, taking braided with being taken, grace howling under resistance like wind through canyon walls.

Reading, I felt myself on the bank of a river I've never seen, yet somehow recognise—something stirring under the skin, salt in the throat, mud between toes. The distance here isn't only geographical. It's blood-deep—generations of forgetting can taste like copper pennies, can sound like static where stories should be. Still, recognition rang in my chest like the particular thrum a struck bell makes underwater. Diaz's water doesn't cleanse—it presses in and leaves behind sediment and salt. It's water that remembers the shape of every mouth that tried to swallow it.

What stunned me most was how Diaz treats contradiction like a live wire—only she doesn't insulate it, doesn't ground it; she just lets it spark across the page. Love is both a wound and a weapon. The colonised body contains both divinity and desecration. It's the specific friction between being witnessed and being spared, between being held and being handled. In "American Arithmetic", flesh transforms into fraction, protest, and ghost—sometimes all at once. "The First Water Is the Body" isn't a metaphor—it's an assertion, an equation, and an invocation. Every sentence costs something. Every line demands breath, blood, presence.

I reached the book's end feeling both hollowed out and heavier. Something passed close in the current—close enough to feel, too far to catch. These poems didn't offer inheritance, but they offered rhythm—footfall, heartbeat, the click of prayer beads between fingers. Perhaps I don't remember the river. But maybe the river remembers something no one taught me the shape of, and maybe that's enough. Or maybe it isn't. Diaz doesn't offer closure—only space. She lets longing settle like silt, unresolved and unashamed.

Her work isn't merely poetry. It's a pressure system. It is akin to a body of water, possessing its own unique gravitational pull. It transforms from grit to grief and then back to grace. It's a map marked by salt. I'll return to it—not for clarity but for contact. To press again against what I cannot name. To listen for that thin, familiar note—the one that travels through bedrock, through silence, through marrow.