Written in the 1930s but left unfinished for decades before its eventual publication in 1974, Yonnondio is one of the great lost novels of American working-class literature.

Following a family as they move between mining camps, tenant farms and industrial towns during the Depression, Tillie Olsen captures poverty not as backdrop but as a total atmosphere, shaping language, memory and consciousness itself. Her prose moves effortlessly between realism and interior monologue, anticipating later writers while remaining unmistakably her own.

Although best known for Tell Me a Riddle and Silences, Olsen's only novel has become a cult classic in its own right. Fiercely political yet deeply humane, it is a novel about labour, childhood, migration, women's lives and survival under capitalism, written with extraordinary formal invention and emotional precision. Essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American literature, feminist writing or working-class fiction.

2004 University of Nebraska Press paperback with introduction by Linda Ray Pratt. A clean, well-kept copy with only light shelf wear.