The City of Woven Streets
Also known as The Weaver.
The tapestry of life may be more fragile than it seems: pull one thread, and all will unravel.
In the City of Woven Streets, human life has little value. You practice a craft to keep you alive, or you are an outcast, unwanted and tainted. Eliana is a young weaver in the House of Webs, but secretly knows she doesn’t really belong there. She is hiding a shameful birth defect that would, if anyone knew about it, land her in the House of the Tainted, a prison for those whose very existence is considered a curse.
When an unknown woman with her tongue cut off and Eliana’s name tattooed on her skin arrives at the House of Webs, Eliana discovers an invisible network of power behind the city’s facade. All the while, the sea is clawing the shores and the streets are slowly drowning.
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Emmi Itäranta
When Emmi Itäranta began writing Memory of Water, she did something quietly radical—she wrote it in two languages at once. Switching back and forth between Finnish and English as the story unfolded, she created a novel that carried the rhythm and intimacy of both languages, a rare duality that mirrors the world she so often writes about: beautiful, fragile, and quietly brimming with tension.
Born in Tampere, Finland, Itäranta grew up surrounded by forests, lakes, and a culture steeped in nature’s rhythms—landscapes that seep into her fiction like mist. Her writing is not loud or showy; it lingers like a memory, often blurring the line between dystopia and dream. Her debut novel, Memory of Water, tells the story of a young tea master’s apprentice in a future where water is tightly rationed—a haunting premise rendered with poetic restraint. The book earned international acclaim, winning the Kalevi Jäntti Prize and being nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, quietly placing her on the global speculative fiction map.
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