Contract with the world

the long version

Told as a series of interconnected stories, Jane Rule's fifth novel 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.