If you liked
Books like The Safekeep
Loved The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from literary fiction, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
James
A radical retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim — rechristened James — who is far more intelligent, self-aware and morally complex than Twain's narrator allows him to be. Everett's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating, often darkly funny examination of race, freedom and the authorship of American stories.
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2
Small Rain
A poet experiences a sudden, excruciating pain that leads to a hospitalisation for a rare cardiac emergency, and the days that follow — confined to an ICU during the pandemic — become an extended meditation on the body, illness, love and what matters when survival itself is uncertain. Greenwell's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel is an intensely interior account of crisis, told with extraordinary precision about pain, fear and tenderness.
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3
The First State of Being
In the summer of 1999, twelve-year-old Michael, anxious about Y2K and obsessed with survival preparation, encounters a boy who has time-travelled from the future — and the encounter changes how Michael understands time, fear and what actually matters. Kelly's Newbery Medal-winning novel is about anxiety, friendship and the strange comfort of knowing the future doesn't end the way you fear.
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4
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
Shesheshen, a shapeshifting monster who has lived in a ruined keep for centuries, falls in love with Homily, the woman sent by a group of monster-hunters to kill her — and must navigate romance while hiding what she really is. Wiswell's Nebula Award-winning novel is a horror-romance that takes its monster's perspective entirely seriously, asking what love looks like when one partner literally cannot show their true self.
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5
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, workers digging a water main in Pottstown, Pennsylvania uncover a skeleton that unravels the hidden history of a neighbourhood shared by Black and Jewish communities in the 1930s. McBride's warm, morally complex novel is about the unlikely alliances between the marginalised and what a community of outcasts can offer each other.
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6
The Bee Sting
Four members of an Irish family — father, mother, teenage son, teenage daughter — each give their own account of the crisis tearing their world apart, in chapters that get progressively shorter as the disaster accelerates. Murray's novel is a formally daring, darkly funny account of family collapse, financial catastrophe and the things families never say to each other.
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7
Flesh
Following one Hungarian-British man — István — from his teenage years on a Budapest housing estate through decades of life in the economic shadow of London's super-rich, Szalay's spare, propulsive novel tracks a man who is emotionally detached yet persistently unravelled by events beyond his control. Winner of the Booker Prize 2025.
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8
Orbital
Six astronauts orbit Earth every ninety minutes, watching sixteen sunrises a day, as storms and fires rage below and one crew member waits for news of her dying mother. Harvey's Booker Prize-winning novella asks what it means to look at the Earth from outside it — and whether distance creates clarity or only the illusion of it.
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9
Fourth Wing
Violet Sorrengail, trained for the scribe's quiet life, is forced by her commanding-general mother into the brutal dragon riders' college at Basgiath, where cadets die routinely and her physical frailty makes her a target. Yarros's romantasy phenomenon — dragons, deadly trials and an enemies-to-lovers romance — defined the genre's mainstream breakout and sold millions through BookTok.
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10
The Covenant of Water
In Kerala, South India, a family is afflicted across three generations by a peculiar condition — in every generation, someone dies by drowning. Spanning 1900 to 1977, Verghese's saga interweaves medicine, faith, caste and the extraordinary changes of 20th-century India. An Oprah's Book Club selection and one of the most-read literary novels of its year.