The release of Go Set a Watchman next week is already shaping as the literary event of the century. The sequel (or ‘parent’ as Harper Lee calls it) to her seminal 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, exploring racial injustice in the American Deep South, will demand a two million copy initial print run in the US, numbers which have never been seen before.
The release of the novel hasn’t been without controversy, with media outlets reporting that Lee, who is 89 years old and living in assisted living in Alabama, was not capable of giving proper consent to the publishers.
The reports were challenged when longtime friend Wayne Flynt, who visiting Lee the day before news broke about Go Set a Watchman, said in a recent interview “This narrative of senility, exploitation of this helpless little old lady is just hogwash. It’s just complete bunk.”
One thing is for certain, any reader who fell in love with To Kill a Mockingbird will have their lives changed forever by reading Go Set a Watchman. This is the novel a handful of people ever knew existed, and next week it will be here.
The literary world will never be the same.
Pre-order your copy of Go Set a Watchman here
Go Set a Watchman
by Harper Lee
Set during the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later.
Scout 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.
An instant classic.
Pre-order your copy of Go Set a Watchman here
About the Contributor
Andrew Cattanach
Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.
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