Hello and welcome to GabFest reads for the month of January. I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the co-hosts of

Plates Political GabFest. I am here today to talk about the new novel The Safe Keep with its author,

Jaelle Fundervout. Hi, A'all. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Emily.

Such an honor to be here.

When I read The Safe Keep, all I knew about it pretty much was that a good friend of mine and my sister recommended it.

And it had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

But I didn't know a single thing about the book. And I actually loved entering it

that way. This is a book that has a kind of haunting at the center of it. And so we're going to

talk about the whole book. But I really recommend that listeners read this book before listening

to this entire conversation because I did really

thrill to the feelings of discovery I had as I was going through the narrative. And I think,

Al, you very carefully and deliberately kind of constructed the book to have a kind of mystery at the

center of it. So let's start so we don't spoil the whole mystery up top by talking about the setting you chose,

which is the Netherlands in 1961.

Why did you pick that book for this, your very successful debut novel?

It's so good to hear that that's how it ended up on your desk because that's,

that was my greatest stuff.

I was just hoping that people would, that the book would be given to somebody, just that that

that's how it would be passed on, somebody telling you, don't, don't read anything about

this, just dive into it.

And I was also hoping that I could sort of sneakily sort of get to some readers that otherwise

would not have read the book.

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