Go Set a Watchman, is scheduled to be published by Harper Collins in July. It is essentially the follow-up to To Kill a Mockingbird, about Scout, 20 years later, going back home..
" When Scout travels to her small Southern town of Maycomb, from New York City, to visit her father, Atticus, she is, Harper explained, "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. P. Report
Though "the sequel" is really what the original book was going to be, Harper Lee's publisher liked the parts of the story where Scout was reflecting on her days of growing up, and the publisher asked Lee to work on this aspect of the story, so she did.
Even though there is much excitement about the prospect of a new book written by one of America's most reclusive writer's, there is also controversy… 2 months after Harper Lee's sister Alice passed away, the one person in Harper Lee's life that protected her ferociously from the outside world, we have Harper Lee agreeing to be thrown back in the spotlight after 50 plus years with an unedited first attempt at a novel that she agreed to have published as is. In declining health, living in an assisted living facility near her home in Monroeville, AL, already "possibly" forgetting some of the things she agreed to such as her blessing on the Marja Mills novel, The Mockingbird Next Door, or having to sue to retain her copyright for To Kill a Mockingbird, which she signed over to her publisher (would she knowingly do that?!), and even suing the town museum that honors her book, it has been asked, is anyone taking advantage of Miss Nelle? It certainly would be a goldmine to publish anything written by Harper Lee. The world has waited over 50 years for another novel.
Oh, how I hope this book is being published with Harper Lee's blessing! I was enjoying The Mockingbird Next Door by Marja Mills, the book about Harper Lee and her sister that Marja wrote while living next door to Harper Lee in Monroeville, until I read that Harper Lee said the book was "unauthorized". But then Penguin produced a letter signed by Harper Lee saying she did give her blessing. With her affairs essentially being handled by attorneys now, since neither Lee sister had children, we may never know the true sentiments of Harper Lee. But in any case, I look forward to peeking between the pages of a new Harper Lee novel that I hope she would want the world to enjoy.
Read more from…
The BBC, The Vulture, and Publishers Weekly
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