"A Walk in the Night" follows the character Michael (Mikey) Adonis, who was just fired in a factory for talking to his white boss. As Michael walks through Cape Town's ghetto District 6 all night, he is confronted with the grim shady sides of his community. While Michael tries to cool his anger while walking and to clear it with alcohol, his night takes many turns.

Of French and Malagasy stock, involved in South African politics from an early age, Alex La Guma was arrested for treason with 155 others in 1956 and finally acquitted in 1960. During the State of Emergency following the Sharpeville massacre he was detained for five months. Continuing to write, he endured house arrest and solitary confinement. La Guma left South Africa as a refugee in 1966 and lived in exile in London and Havana. He died in 1986. "A Walk in the Night and Other Stories" reveals La Guma as one of the most important African writers of his time. These works reveal the plight of non-whites in apartheid South Africa, laying bare the lives of the poor and the outcasts who filled the ghettoes and shantytowns.