Jonah, a hunchback larrikin, lives in a Sydney slum where he is the leader of the local "Push", a street gang. But his life changes when he becomes father to a son, and he strives to break away from his previous life.
A reviewer in The Sydney Morning Herald understood the worth of the novel from its first publication: "In Jonah, Mr. Louis Stone has given us an excellent novel. He has taken a phase of Australian life which has been rather neglected by local writers, and laid his setting in the slums of Sydney of a few years ago. Mr. Stone knows his subject, and writes with humour and observation, and a great deal of kindliness. His theme is often squalid, and the surroundings often repellent, but the author, without idealising, does not lay undue insistence on the unpleasant."[2]
Writing about the book in The Queensland Times as it was about to be reprinted in 1933, Aidan de Brune stated: "Competent critics declare that this book is a worthy successor to Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life, amongst Australian novels that can properly be called "classic.""[3]
In his book, The Making of the Sentimental Bloke, Alec H. Chisholm notes that Louis Stone was certain that C.J. Dennis had stolen his larrikin ideas for his popular verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, though he, Chisholm, was not so sure.[8]
