In this paper, we propose a new library which for distributed systems, from the programmers perspective, behaves like shared memory for arbitrary reads but restricts the address ranges that individual nodes can write to a range of addresses that they “own”. We show how this design, despite the owner-compute restriction can aid programmer productivity by enabling straight-forward parallelisations of typical array-manipulating codes. Furthermore, we delineate an open-source implementation of the proposed library named “Shray”. Using the programming interface of Shray, we compare possible hand-parallelised codes of example applications with implementations in other DSM/PGAS systems demonstrating the programming style enabled by Shray, and providing some initial performance figures.