Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee, published in 2015 by HarperCollins in the United States and Heinemann in Britain. It was written before her only other published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which appeared in 1960, and it was initially presented by its publishers as a sequel.

Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, comes home to Maycomb from New York to visit her aging father, and the visit takes place against the civil rights conflicts of the period. The town is familiar and the arrangements have not changed, which is exactly the problem: what she assumed about the people she left behind turns out to have been assembled by a much younger woman.

The manuscript was written in the 1950s, before Mockingbird, and its publication decades later produced a long argument about what the book was and whether it should have been issued at all. It is read now as a draft that shows an earlier version of the characters, with Atticus in a very different light.