A curious book, in a good way. A post-global-warming-and-Chinese-takeover story that at first seems to present itself as yet another Collins-style teenage dystopia, but then shrugs at launching the Big Heroic Plot and instead chooses to act local, mixing buddhist philosophy and stubborn Scandinavian existentialism into something that seems to want to fuse PK Dick and Tove Jansson (OK, enough with the namedropping already).

It's long after the polar icecaps melted, in what used to be central Finland and is now a border province of New Qian. The old coastlines are long gone, the world has dried up and freshwater is increasingly rare. Our narrator is a young woman apprenticing for her father to become the new Tea Master of her village - a position that, like most traditions, has been important for so long nobody remembers when it wasn't or why, but which of course relies on the very resource that's becoming ever more scarce, ever more controlled, ever more the privilege of those with guns. They have access to a secret well, but the rest of the village don't, and her best friend (or more) has none... From there, Itäranta spins a tale that for the most part isn't interested in any big rebellions or revelations, but instead the personal angle, with Water as the central (perhaps at times too central) metaphor of constance and change, along with the wordless power of silence (I did mention it's a Finnish novel, right?) to both oppress and release, destroy and preserve.

It's not the strongest 4 I've ever doled out, it gets a bit preachy at times and I'm not entirely sure it's quite as profound as it tries to be. But it's a quick, engrossing read that still has a serene but serious dignity to it, and one that seems to want to seep into other things. We'll see how it holds up, but for now I really like it.