Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9780935312386
Publication Date: 06-01-1985

Translated by Margaret S. Lacy

This autobiographical first novel of working-class life by Moa Martinson, the "Agnes Smedley of Sweden," follows two young women, both victims of sexual abuse, as they become friends and determine to gain for themselves and their children the rights and oppportunities usually denied women, and especially poor women.

"I love and am ineradicably grateful for this book, this writer, as I have been but to a few dozen others in my lifetime. There is little to help us imagine the vanished work and lives of the women before us who did not have literacy, circumstances, to pen their own. Moa Martinson, whose life this was for years, illumines, rounds them for us with such profound understanding, love, art, that they become indelibly our own. Images, scenes, relationships, comprehensions portrayed here will never leave us. She is a writer of international stature and significance—in her life as well as her work. We are fortunate indeed to have the beauty of Margaret Lacy's translation." —Tillie Olsen, author of Silences

"This is a lovely book and an important rediscovery. Women and Appletrees will introduce American readers to a world that is harsh yet strangely beautiful, and to women whose lives reveal the pain but also the poetry of our existence." —Elaine Hedges, author of In Her Own Image