Carly Holmes – Love Letters on the River

We are delighted to welcome Carly Holmes to talk about her first work of non-fiction Love Letters on the River, a book inspired by living in a small village on the banks of the river Teifi.

From a young age Carly Holmes has been in thrall to the creatures that live around us. Her childhood companion was a blind gander called Beep Beep who thought she was his wife. She nearly postponed her wedding when a pair of wrens nested in a hole by her back door and cut it very fine to fledge their chicks into an assorted audience of cats and magpies.

This collection of essays, beautifully illustrated throughout by acclaimed local artist Guy Manning, are each of them love letters to the Teifi valley and to the river that winds through Carly’s days. The wild animals – the badgers who visit nightly for peanuts; the juvenile osprey who learned to fish on the estuary across the lane; the young jackdaw she nurtured until it was healthy enough to ignore her whenever she went into the garden; the cuckoos she discovered in flagrante one afternoon on a lockdown walk – are the very heart of it.

Carly is also the author of the novels The Scrapbook, which was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award, and Crow Face, Doll Face. Her short story collection, Figurehead, was published by Tartarus Press in limited-edition hardback and reprinted in paperback by Parthian Books. She has had numerous stories published in journals and anthologies.