Modelled on the famous eleventh-century Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, this anthology gathers writing that drifts effortlessly between diary, essay, memoir, fiction and fragment.

Alison Hennegan assembles a chorus of voices that treats lesbian life as something textured, contradictory and lived. Everyday pleasures sit beside heartbreak, eroticism beside humour, literary reflection beside domestic observation.

Originally published at a moment when lesbian publishing was expanding beyond activist presses into a richer literary culture, the collection captures the breadth of that moment without becoming a historical curiosity. Contributors range across generations and national traditions, producing a book less concerned with consensus than with the pleasure of juxtaposition. The result is a literary miscellany in the older sense of the word: a cabinet of fragments that accumulate into something larger than any single essay or story.

First British edition, Fourth Estate, 2000. Paperback. Covers show light shelf wear with minor creasing to the corners. Binding is firm and the pages are clean with no visible inscriptions, annotations or foxing.