Good Girl centres on Nila, a 19-year-old student of Afghan refugees living in Berlin in what seems to be around the late 2000s/early 2010s. She has lost her mother and is keen to distance herself from her father, and throws herself into the Berlin clubbing scene, spending long nights and days partying, notably at ‘the Bunker’ (transparently Berghain) where she meets the much older American writer Marlowe, with whom she begins a tempestuous sort-of-relationship based around a mutual affection for art and the consumption of illicit substances.

The Safekeep begins in the early 1960s in the rural Dutch province of Overijssel. We meet the book’s central character, Isabel, who lives alone in her family home, following her mother’s death. She obsessively tends to the house, while knowing she is only a temporary occupant. The house will eventually pass to her elder brother Louis, who like her other brother Hendrick has no interest in living in the house, having left and embraced city life. The three siblings meet for a dinner early in the book, at which Louis introduces his latest girlfriend Eva, to whom Isabel is openly and viciously rude. When Louis is later called away for work, he insists that Eva stay in the family home with Isabel, much to the latter’s dismay.