Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2008

A stunning debut novel from this award-winning poet and essayist, Sea Holly is a story of drifting, burnt-out lives, shadowed by the mysterious disappearance of a vivacious young girl.

Sea Holly tells the story of John Vine, a hard working English teacher who has left job and family and moved to a nearby coastal caravan park, calling bingo numbers for a living.

John Vine? He has it all. Home, family, career.You can't knock that. But he has this worm inside him,this dissatisfaction… A boy of twenty, that's OK, he's going to dream. But a man of fifty? With a young piece who thinks he's not half bad?… believe me that's when everything's going to come loose. That's when it's going to get dangerous.

"Minhinnick has brought his poet's eye to the landscape and a realism to the lives of his characters. It is an unsettling read, but I'm glad I made the effort."
Rodney Troubridge, Waterstone's Fiction Marketing Planner

"Minhinnick evokes a place in which detritus and squalor go hand in hand with the untameable wildness and beauty of nature... Minhinnick has crafted a powerful and uneasy novel whose central protagonist, with his failure to make 'his life fit the shape it needed to fit', is a painfully convincing example of the inner conflict that plays at the heart of so much of human experience."
New Welsh Review

"It's language quicksilvering a howl of anguish… on the strength of this book alone, Minhinnick stakes his claim to be regarded as the finest writer working in any genre in Wales today."
Jim Perrin, on To Babel and Back

"The leading Welsh poet of his generation"
Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times

"The man is a consistent winner... Robert Minhinnick has been regarded as the best writer in Wales now for more than a decade and his voice needs to be heard internationally."
Western Mail

Robert Minhinnick has an international reputation as a poet and essayist. An environmental campaigner, he has travelled to, and written about many parts of the world and is recognised as one of Wales' foremost poets. His first poetry collection was published more than twenty-five years ago. He has won the Forward Poetry Prize twice and his last book, To Babel and Back – a series of essays from America, Iraq and his native Wales, was the Welsh Book of the Year 2006.