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.
