Love Letters on the River

Includes around a dozen black and white illustrations commissioned exclusively for this publication by acclaimed local artist Guy Manning.

Describing encounters and missed encounters with the wildlife that surrounds the Teifi, Love Letters on the River is a lyrical, honest and tender tribute to the many creatures - both in the garden and beyond the garden wall - that bring joy to Carly's life simply by existing.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.