Carly Holmes - Böcker

The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. It's about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it's about absence and the power that a void can exert over a person's life.

Riverwise, a volume of slow river prose centred around Afon Teifi, is a book of wanderings and wonderings, witnessings and enchantments, rememberings and endings. Weaving memoir, poetry and keen observation into its meandering course, it shifts across time and space to reflect the beauty of hidden, fluvial places, and to meditate on the strangeness of being human.

When Biddy Wells's elderly mother is suddenly struck down with a mysterious illness, Biddy moves her into the spare bedroom. Through the months that follow, the women have to re-inhabit the close domestic proximity that they'd abandoned decades before and learn how to co-exist within a tangled web of emotional need.

This anthology brings together the winning entries to the Penfro Festival's Poetry and Prose competitions, selected by Rhiannon Hooson and Niall Griffiths.

Unhappily married mother of four, Annie is drowning in domestic servitude. She often wonders what her life could have been had she not had children, but when her youngest daughters perform a seemingly impossible act of levitation, her life is touched with magic and she realises that her girls are truly special and that she must protect them. Eventually Annie musters the courage to leave the wreck of her marriage, but she commits a terribly unthinkable, unmotherly act along the way. Crow Face, Doll Face explores being forced to live with the consequences of the decisions we make and the fantasies we construct to soothe ourselves when the life we live falls far short of the life we planned.

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, 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.