Go Set a Watchman is set during the mid-1950s and features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father's attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.
'A new work, and a pleasure, revelation and genuine literary event...Go Set a Watchman shakes the settled view of both an author and her novel...This publication intensifies the regret that Harper Lee published so little.' -- Mark Lawson, Guardian
'Go Set a Watchman is the more radical, ambitious and politicised of the two novels Lee has now published...It has contemporary relevance where Mockingbird is safely sealed off as a piece of American history...It does not undermine Mockingbird but it makes a reassessment of that story absolutely necessary...It is a book of enormous literary interest...Beguiling and distinctive, and reminiscent of Mockingbird...Go Set a Watchman can't be dismissed as literary scraps from Lee's imagination. It has too much integrity for that.' Arifa Akbar, Independent
Author
About Harper Lee
Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, a village that is still her home. She attended local schools and the University of Alabama. Before she started writing she lived in New York, where she worked in the reservations department of an international airline. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, two honorary degrees and various other literary awards. Her chief interests apart from writing are nineteenth-century literature and eighteenth-century music, watching politicians and cats, travelling and being alone. She died in February 2016.
