Go Set a Watchman: Harper Lee's sensational lost novel

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. An instant classic.

About the Author :
Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She is the author of the acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird, originally published in 1960; and Go Set a Watchman, published in July 2015. Ms Lee received the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and numerous other literary awards and honours. She died in 2016. Reese Witherspoon is an award-winning actress, producer, New York Times bestselling author and founder. In 2016, she established the media brand, Hello Sunshine, which puts women at the center of every story across all platforms – from scripted and unscripted television, feature films, animated series, podcasts, audio storytelling, and digital series. Hello Sunshine is also home to “Reese’s Book Club,” a community propelled by meaningful connections with stories, authors, and fellow members. Witherspoon is best known for her roles in feature films like Walk the Line, Wild, Election and Legally Blonde as well as Emmy award-winning TV series Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere and The Morning Show.

Review :
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. 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. More edgy and thought provoking [than To Kill a Mockingbird] … It has a power to it beyond being a mere historical curio or more lit crit material for Harper Lee studies… Eccentric characters are brightly drawn. There is Lee’s trademark warmth, some droll lines and the sense of place and time is strong…[It has] a surprisingly provocative message — don’t airily dismiss the prejudices of others, try to understand them. The flashes of lyrical genius and ability to evoke the intensity of childhood play that come to fruition in To Kill a Mockingbird are in evidence…It’s nowhere near the novel Mockingbird is. It is much better than that…What Watchman tells us, and tells us rather powerfully, is that racism is not confined to people who are so clearly not like us…Watchman is for grown-ups. It asks serious questions about what racism is. And it comes at a time when American desperately needs a grown-up conversation about race. I’m happy to report that most of the caveats and conspiracy theories surrounding Go Set a Watchman melt away as you read the opening chapters and reacquaint yourself with that beguiling Harper Lee narrative style — warm, sardonic, amused by male folly and social pretension, wryly funny, a sassy Southern voice, Mark Twain with a dash of Katharine Hepburn. We have travelled into the past and returned to find that our present is not quite the same as we left it. Atticus Finch will never again be the white knight we once thought him. And yet the mockingbird still sings — no longer a song of innocence, but maybe one of experience; a song that combines sorrow, forgiveness — and, ultimately, a kind of hope. There are some flashes of genius…My favourite scene is at “a coffee”, where our rebellious Scout must make small talk with a bunch of married former acquaintances whom she deliberately hasn’t seen since school. Lee’s précis of their vapid conversation is hilarious, feminist and wickedly modern. Go Set A Watchman is a powerful and moving novel… The opening chapters are slow and languorous, beautifully setting the scene. Lee’s unadorned style is lit up by the occasional sparkling metaphor. A literary masterpiece, and an enjoyable one at that. Equally significant today, and imbued with Lee’s wisdom, humanity and humour.