Told as a series of interconnected stories, Jane Rule's fifth novel-offering six characters' shifting perspectives-takes us to a place where feminism, creativity, and sexual politics collide Contract with the World follows a group of friends, artists, and lovers as they negotiate the shifting terrain of the 1970s-a time when gay and lesbian politics were just emerging. Divided into six parts, the novel enters a world marked by desire, ambition, jealousy, and love. We follow these sexually adventurous thirty-something friends as they marry, divorce, take lovers, lose love, and never stop searching for personal and artistic fulfillment. Whether gay, straight, or bisexual, Rule's characters are as much a product of the era that defines them as of the wise and foolhardy choices they make in their own turbulent lives-choices that will have inevitable, sometimes tragic consequences.
"Her most outspoken and most sensitively handled book to date."
Kate Millett
"Rule's persistent theme is the tyranny of conventional morality, which marginalizes the handicapped and nonconforming, set against a more generous and innovative concept of community, which values human differences."
Contemporary Novelists
"This is good writing. You know it from the first page: the wonderful relief of being in competent hands, the sense of adventure in language, in characterization, in perception. It is a fine portrait of a generation."
