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Harper Lee Returns

Friday, Jul 17, 2015 at 12:02pm

After a lifetime of maintaining that she would never publish another novel, the media-shy Harper Lee finds herself in a place she traditionally has avoided for most of her career: the news. That’s because this summer her heretofore only published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), is being joined by its sequel, Go Set a Watchman. In a statement delivered through her publisher, the book’s long-lost manuscript was discovered by her lawyer, “in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Originally written in the mid-1950s, Lee submitted Go Set a Watchman to her publisher before To Kill a Mockingbird. It features many of the characters from the iconic novel some twenty years later as they find themselves adjusting to the turbulent events transforming mid-1950s America. Returning home to Maycomb to visit her father, Jean Louise Finch — Scout — struggles with issues both personal and political, involving Atticus, society and the small Alabama town that shaped her. Exploring the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird in a time of evolving social flux, Go Set a Watchman casts a new light on Lee’s enduring classic, while at the same time standing as a powerful novel in its own right.

Go Set a Watchman is available now in hardcover. Purchase online, or contact your nearest McNally Robinson bookstore to place an in-store hold.

Categories: buzz, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Publishing News, Literature

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Go Set a Watchman

- Harper Lee

Hardcover $34.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $31.49

#1 New York Times Bestseller

"Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades...
   -- New York Times (Opinion Pages)

A landmark novel by Harper Lee, set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch--"Scout"--returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past--a journey that can only be guided by one's own conscience.

Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of the late Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision--a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic.

To Kill a Mockingbird

- Harper Lee

Mass market paperback $12.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $11.69

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.