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.

Study for Obedience is something of a difficult one to summarize. It’s a short book but in no senses a simple one. The unnamed female narrator arrives in an unnamed Northern European country (seemingly Scandinavian or Baltic), to tend to the needs of her successful oldest brother. Her own background seems fairly obviously Jewish, a fact that inspires hatred in the local residents, seemingly in part down to their past as collaborators (at least) in major atrocities (most probably the Holocaust, though it isn’t specifically named) against her people. Various troubles in the town, largely involving death of or disruption to local pets and farm animals, are attributed by the locals to her, and she is avoided, feared, and seemingly plotted against by the residents. With her brother frequently away on business, and she unable to speak the language, the whole thing has a fairly dense layer of mystery about it.

Fugitive Pieces is a novel in two sections, each focusing on a character's attempts to deal with trauma and loss relating to the Holocaust. Its first and longer section focuses on Jakob Beer, who as a 7-year old is the only person in his town to survive a round-up of Jews by invading Nazis. He is found by a Greek archaeologist, Athos Roussos, who take him into his care, moving him secretly to Zakynthos in Greece.

Keneally’s Holocaust novel, the basis of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, zooms in on the story of Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German industrialist who takes it upon himself to “save” thousands of Jews, initially by employing them in his enamelworks factory, Emalia, in Krakow (Poland), rather than having them sent to the horrors of Amon Goeth’s nearby Plaszow internment camp or - far worse - to almost certain extermination at Auschwitz. The later part of the novel documents the (even more incredible and shocking) transit of the Schindlerjuden away from the doomed Emalia camp and to a new factory near Schindler’s Sudeten/Czech hometown.