The Shelf is a repository in the coroner’s office where Cassandra’s letters to Anne are lodged. And with them is that other letter – the one Anne never posted, the one found in her handbag. It was all so long ago – back in the 1960s – but Cass has not been able to forget the passion Anne engendered in her, their brief affair, and the mystery that ended it.

Kay Dick’s most autobiographical novel is written as a letter to Kirk, who is modelled on her great friend and fellow novelist Francis King, and relates the story of the brief affair she had with a married woman in the early 1960s – not long after the breakdown of her relationship with Kathleen Farrell. The events described are true, her narrator tells Kirk, adding “Though I shall deny it, of course.”

“A haunting lament” – The New Yorker

“A very good (hard, cold solid, jagged fragment of life’s ambiguity” – Brigid Brophy

“Ranks alongside Brigid Brophy, Elizabeth Bowen and Maureen Duffy… precise, simple and lucid” – Gay Times

“This short, fierce, intelligent novel is as subtly accurate about […] lesbian love as it is about the pain of loss; and forgetting; and the fear of death” – Elaine Feinstein, The Times

“She turns an exact, abstracting gaze on the moments at which one person’s existence may touch, or fail to touch, another’s, and her concern is to disentangle the intricate dialogue of a passion” – TLS

“A cool rehearsal of a strange love affair […] gracefully written” – Guardian

“This evocation of the strange affair between Cass and Anne is at once delicate, elegant and subtle… both women are slightly exotic, mysterious characters on the edge of the circles in which they move, and both are by turns exasperating and haunting” Punch

“Precise, delicately written… A quietly telling study of vulnerability, responsibility and the way victims may conspire at their own destruction” – Sunday Telegraph

“The suspicion – which Dick cultivates – that the narrative is uncomfortably close to autobiography, gives the book an authentic chill” – Lorna Sage, Observer

“[The Shelf] recalls writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Taylor [in its] willingness to regard the intricacies of love, the shifting patterns of light and shade in the relationship of one person to another, as of prime importance […] it is informed throughout by a weight of experience and reflection that make it a great deal more substantial than many novels three times its length” – Allan Massie, The Scotsman

“A fine novella – intimately confessional, sensitive and robust and, at last, generously affectionate… few novels five times as long reveal so much about their characters” – The Spectator

“A tour de force… powerful in its evocation of relationship and the gradations of passion. This work places Kay Dick in the same category of sensibility as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield and Ford Maddox Ford” – Gillian Freeman

“The theme, manner and writing all evoke Colette” – Daily Telegraph