It is the long, hot summer of 1963 and New York is filled with lovers, dreamers and protestors. Young African-American women grow out their hair and discover the taste of new freedoms. Young men, white and black, travel south to fight against segregation, praying for a society in which love is colour-free.

Written in the late 1960s and early 1970s but overlooked in Kathleen Collins’s lifetime, these stories mark the debut of a masterful writer whose electrifying voice was almost lost to history.