[I Sent a Letter to My Love] focuses on themes of loneliness and deprivation, on the pain of hopes and expectations arbitrarily but surely aborted by circumstance. Amy Evans has lived all her life in a Welsh seaside town; as a child her mother hated her for being the ugly and rebellious antithesis to her crippled brother Stanley…. Now a middle-aged woman, Amy still finds her life circumscribed by Stanley's gracefully passive wheelchair existence. She attempts to break this cycle of failed and frustrated loving by advertising with a box-number in the local paper's personal columns. Only one "gentleman with similar needs" replies: her own brother.

The second half of the novel concerns the subterfuges Amy adopts to protect and sustain his fantasies and her own. It implies forcibly the way sexuality is conditioned by the frustration of non-sexual needs, by mental rather than physical experiences. The story...