Harper Lee Press Reviews
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. -- Mark Lawson Guardian
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. -- Arifa Akbar Independent
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. -- Robbie Millen The Times
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. -- Erica Wagner New Statesman
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. -- John Walsh Sunday Times
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. -- Joanne Harris Daily Mail
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 precis of their vapid conversation is hilarious, feminist and wickedly modern. -- Katy Guest Independent on Sunday
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. -- Vanessa Berridge Daily Express
A literary masterpiece, and an enjoyable one at that. -- Natasha Harding Sun
About Harper Lee
Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, a village that is still her home. She attended local schools and the University of Alabama. Before she started writing she lived in New York, where she worked in the reservations department of an international airline. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, two honorary degrees and various other literary awards. Her chief interests apart from writing are nineteenth-century literature and eighteenth-century music, watching politicians and cats, travelling and being alone. She died in February 2016.
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