Set in a heat-struck New York after World War II, Summer Crossing tells the story of the young socialite, Grady McNeil, who rebels against the dresses, debuts and eligible young bachelors her family have planned for her. As her parents make a summer crossing to France to check on their war-damaged villa, leaving Grady their Fifth Avenue apartment, she stokes up a secret affair she is having with a Jewish war veteran who works as a parking lot attendant. Grady makes a crossing of her own to an altogether more difficult social experience as she makes some dangerous choices which ultimately have disastrous consequences for herself and those who love her.

Grady is a stylish and defiant heroine, drawn with masterful sympathy, and reminiscent of Holly Golightly. Summer Crossing offers insights into Truman Capote's developing literary style, but it is also an absorbing story in its own right, exhibiting the exquisitely balanced prose and insights into the psychology of human desire forwhich he became famous.

Truman Capote wrote Summer Crossing aged barely twenty. He abandoned the manuscript in 1966 when he left his humble Brooklyn apartment - along with its contents - after the success of his journalistic novel In Cold Blood. His housesitter rescued a cache of documents from the pavement outside the apartment and these eventually came up for auction in Sotheby's, New York, in 2004. The novel, which scholars and biographers had feared lost since Capote's death in 1984, was handwritten in four school notebooks, and heavily corrected in his hand.