Maren Holloway: author on Booklabria

Maren Holloway · Booklabria

Sep 20, 2026

Studio Note

The archive: a note on book two

Sunday, 20 September

Coming soon

A short one about The Ledger of the Buried, which is book two and is listed as coming soon. Book one was about a girl who did not know what she was. Book two is about what it costs to be taught. The Sextons take Edda in, and the thing I most wanted to write was the craft itself: the ledger where the world's forgetting is written down and made to hold, the grey coins a memory gets minted into, the spade. Every marvel in this series is paid for in the self, and in this book she starts learning her price. I will say one more thing and then stop. She came to learn the craft. She is learning what it was built to keep from her. The archive has a deepest room, and there is a record in it of the erased, and there is a name in that record. That is as far as I will go. The blurb is on the book's page if you want it; the rest is under the floor.

The Underloam · Book 2

The Ledger of the Buried

Maren Holloway

Sep 19, 2026

Series Update

The Underloam seven books

Book two is next: The Ledger of the Buried, and the seven

Out
Coming
Coming
Coming
Coming
Coming
Coming

A note on where The Underloam goes from here, because I have been asked, and because I would rather you had the map from me. Seven books, one closed arc, in this order: The Remembered Street, The Ledger of the Buried, The Blank Locket, The Drownmarket, The Rising Loam, The Great Hush, The Unforgotten. The first is out. The rest are listed as coming soon, and I am not going to put dates next to them here, because a date is a promise and I would rather keep the ones I make. Book two is The Ledger of the Buried. Taken in by the Sextons, Edda learns the trade she was born for and forbidden: how the world's forgetting is written into a great ledger and made to hold, how a memory is minted into a grey coin, what it costs the hand that wields the spade. In the deepest room of the archive she finds a record of the erased, and in it a drowned district that answers to a name no one ever gave her. The order teaches that the buried should stay buried. You already know how Edda feels about that. Read in order. The series has been going down since page one, and it does not turn round.

Maren Holloway

Jul 16, 2026

Letter to Readers

Two weeks in Halewick: what we choose to carry

Two weeks since The Remembered Street went out, and I have been thinking about the question underneath it, the one the whole series asks from a hundred angles: what do we choose to carry, and what does it cost to set it down? I did not start with the magic. I started with the grief, and with the strange fact that the world offers two ways to survive a loss. Bury it, and let it sink so far it stops having a name. Or drown in it. Most of us do some of each, and the drowned street under Halewick is only that made literal: the things a whole city agreed to forget, still lit from within, still breathing, waiting for someone who cannot leave a buried thing alone. Edda cannot. That is her gift and it is going to cost her, book after book, because every reclaiming cracks the surface and something starving climbs up after. If you have finished book one, you know what she carried up in the last chapters and what it weighed. If you have not, I will only say: the weight is the point. It is never a question of whether it hurts. Thank you for coming down with her. There is a long way still to go.

Read the whole letter · 1 min

Yours,Maren Holloway

Maren Holloway

Jul 2, 2026

Release Announcement

Out now

The Remembered Street

Out today, 2 July 2026 · The Underloam, book 1

View book

The Remembered Street is out today

The Remembered Street is out today, on Kindle and in paperback. Book one of The Underloam. Some cities forget on purpose. Edda Mercer remembers what they buried. When she hauls a forgotten boy out of the dark and into the light, she saves him. She also draws the eyes of the Sextons: the ancient order that keeps the world thin, quiet, and forgetting, the order that has hunted her kind to the last for six hundred years. They know what she is before she does. And the First Sexton, the man who should order her buried, looks at her muddy hands and her unburied past, and lets her live. Why? That is the question the book ends on, and I am not going to help you with it. What I will tell you is what the series promises and keeps. No fire, no prophecy, no wizard school. The palette is fog, silt, brick and cold water, and it never breaks character. A found family, each missing a different piece of themselves, whose warmth is real and load-bearing. Real stakes and real grief, never graphic. And a marvel never arrives without its cost in the same breath: the drowned street is beautiful, and it is also a grave with the lights still on. I would rather you knew Edda than knew me. Start with her.

Maren Holloway

Jun 11, 2026

Studio Note

The first page: the good hour in the launderette

Thursday, 11 June

Three weeks out

Three weeks until The Remembered Street. Here is how it opens. Not with the Underloam. Not with a marvel. With a girl closing up a launderette at the end of the day, hip-checking the doors shut, holding a count she never decided to learn. I wanted you to meet Edda in the one hour of the day that belongs to her, before anything reaches up through the floor. The machines down to one, the light gone soft and yellow, the fog coming up the estuary at slack tide the way it always does. That hour is the thing she has. Three foster houses and a group home taught her to take what a day offers and never ask it for more. Everything the book does to her afterwards, it does to that hour first. The foghorn is real, by the way. So is the smell of the river in the walls. Halewick is nowhere, and it is every port town that built itself over its own drowned districts and agreed not to talk about it. Read the opening below. Then, on 2 July, come down. From The Remembered Street, chapter one: The last machine shuddered, sighed, and stopped, and the launderette filled with the particular quiet of a room that had been roaring all day and forgotten how to be still. Edda went down the row hip-checking each door shut, and did not let herself count them. Six washers, four dryers, the long folding table with the scorch mark shaped like a county no one could name. She had the count anyway: the bus times too, and the back-room floorboard that gave her away if she stood on it wrong, all of it held completely, without her ever once deciding to learn it. You learned a place so it couldn't surprise you. Three foster houses and a group home had taught her that, and the lesson had taken better than any of them meant.

The Underloam · Book 1

The Remembered Street

Maren Holloway

May 5, 2026

Release Announcement

Out now

The Remembered Street

Out 2 July 2026 · The Underloam, book 1

View book

The Remembered Street, 2 July: magic is forgetting

The Remembered Street comes out on 2 July. It is the first book of The Underloam, and the one I have carried longest, so I want to say what it is before anything else gets said about it. It is about a girl in a fog-drowned port called Halewick, where there is a street that is not on any map, and she is the only one who remembers walking it. Her name is Edda Mercer. She has spent seventeen years telling herself something is wrong with her. Something is right with her, and it is the most dangerous thing in the world. The engine of the whole series is one sentence: magic is forgetting. What the world forgets thoroughly enough does not vanish. It sinks, whole and breathing, into the Underloam, the drowned country beneath the world. Edda can reach through the floor of the world and pull the buried back up. Nothing comes up for free. That is the wonder, and that is the wound, and I could not give you one without the other. I did not want to. Seven books, one closed arc. This is the door in. It opens on 2 July.

Maren HollowayAuthor

Author Journal

The archive: a note on book two

The Underloam seven books

Two weeks in Halewick: what we choose to carry

The Remembered Street

The first page: the good hour in the launderette

The Remembered Street

Maren Holloway