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Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of January.

I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the co-host of Slate's Political Gab Fest. I am here today to talk

about the new novel The Safe Keep with its author, Jaelle Fundervout. Hi, Aal. 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 was my greatest

stuff.

I was just hoping that

people would that the book would be given to somebody just that that's how it would be passed on

...