Go Set a Watchman Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee's sensational lost novel

    • 3.8 • 140 Ratings
    • $15.99
    • $15.99

Publisher Description

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

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – returns home from New York City to visit her ageing 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 be guided only by one’s own conscience.

Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humour 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 a classic.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2015
14 July
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
288
Pages
PUBLISHER
Random House
SELLER
The Random House Group Limited
SIZE
2.3
MB

Customer Reviews

LizzieM ,

Good read

I put off reading Watchman for quite a while mostly due to the fact that Lee did not agree to the publishing before her death, but eventually gave in and enjoyed the book. Interesting to revisit the TKAM characters later in life, especially knowing this book was written first.

Sherro58 ,

Tom Robinson died

In the adoration many feel for Harper Lee's first published novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, and the eponymous movie, it's often forgotten that all Atticus Finch's legal skills did not save his client. Readers saw the trial verdict for the travesty it undoubtedly was and celebrated Atticus's battle against the prevailing bias but none of that changed the outcome. Tom, shot running away, was as dead, his family as bereft, as if he'd been lynched when Atticus, Jem, Scout and Dill combined to prevent it. The message of that book, I think, is one of hope for a different, better world.

Go Set A Watchman has a similar message. It isn't as obvious, and one has to wait for it. I am not sure whether the older Atticus is really a segregationist, or instead, he is travelling with them in order to change their direction. I suspect subsequent re-readings will help me decide. It's clear that Jean Louise, the grown Scout, is not and never will be. The depth of her character, revealed by Harper Lee, is testimony to this steadfastness.

What's interesting is that we know that Harper Lee was working backwards from Jean Louise to Scout, as Watchman predates Mockingbird. The prequel concept is not new to modern readers/viewers as any Star Wars fan can tell you. Yet most of those are set before, not written before, the original. Other reviewers, some of whom, one suspects, may have benefitted from a deeper reading, have not been as well disposed towards Watchman as am I. They see in the less clear moral supremacy of the elder Atticus something of a betrayal. I don't.

I can't help wondering if Mockingbird was a more acceptable tale when it was published. Perhaps the deeper, less obvious, but no less odious, racism apparent in Jean Louise's Maycomb was to close to the bone and it had to be put aside for a more acceptable, white trash version, apparent in the Maycomb of Scout. In any event, Watchman is very readable and deserves to sit alongside Harper Lee's first published work.

You should read this book. Read it for the reasons that football fans go to pre-season games or training - to see how Harper Lee developed as a writer. Read it to see how she saw these characters in their later lives. Read it to understand how racism can be justified in the minds of racists, to the bewilderment of those who are not. Read it because it is just very good.

BeckyEtal ,

Slow start

It took 100 pages before Harper Lee started to get to the point. I wanted to love this but it didn’t really go anywhere.

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