Desert of the Heart, By Jane Rule

Jane Rule's novel about lesbian love was first published in the US in 1964 and received, as Jackie Kay describes in her new introduction, "with wariness and fear".

Evelyn Hall is an academic who has arrived in Reno to get a divorce from her depressive husband, George. She must stay in a boarding house for six weeks to meet the state's legal requirements for divorce, and meets there the young free-spirit Ann Childs, who is such a mirror image of Evelyn that people regularly mistake them for mother and daughter. Rule explores aspects of the love that develops between the two women, and questions the "conventions" that make women settle for unsatisfactory relationships with men.

Rule's style is in the realist vein, and she eschews poetic flights of fancy, even though one or two such flights might have lifted her narrative from its occasional flatness. She has a point to make, but while her characters are never simply ciphers or political chess pieces, her agenda does sometimes limit their development. Ann's relationship with her father and Evelyn's previous brief flirtation with a lonely neighbour, Carol, are only tantalisingly glimpsed.