Memory of Water

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No novel sees the light of day without an enormous amount of support and faith, and I am grateful to those who helped this one become more than just a pile of paper buried in a drawer:

Emma Coode for believing in this book.

Silja Hiidenheimo, Jussi Tiihonen and everyone else at my Finnish publisher Teos for being consistently fantastic.

My agent Elina Ahlbäck for working so hard to bring this book to audiences outside Finland.

Patricia Debney for being the first one to see a novel between the lines of those early pages and for acting as a midwife along the way.

Nancy Gaffield, Nancy Fulton, Jeremy Scott, Craig Ferguson and Mark Wilson for discussion, insight and encouragement.

Todd McEwen and Lucy Ellman for their generosity and kindness.

Marika Riikonen and Päivi Haanpää for friendship, feedback and being the official godmothers to this book.

Mari Paavola for being there when everything changed.

My parents Sirkka Vikman and Tapani Itäranta for teaching me to love reading, books and stories, and my brother Mikko Itäranta for hospitality.

José Casal-Gimenez for teamwork and everything it means.