Elaine Showalter

Death of a Mockingbird

Go Set a Watchman

By

William Heinemann 288pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

In the fifty-five years since its publication, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has become an American classic, taught in schools across the country, made into a memorable film and enshrined as what Oprah Winfrey has called ‘our national novel’. Until 14 July 2015, Lee had never published another book. But the release that day of the long-lost version of the original novel, Go Set a Watchman, was a literary and cultural bombshell. Atticus Finch, the revered, almost sanctified 1930s lawyer hero of To Kill a Mockingbird, is revealed in this book to have been a white supremacist.

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