Fans rush to stores at midnight to buy hotly anticipated Harper Lee novel
THE much-anticipated second novel by Harper Lee has been met with mixed reviews as customers queued in the night to get a copy.
Go Set A Watchman was written before the 89-yearold’s 1960 bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird, featuring the story of a rape trial in the racially divided deep south of the US, but only unearthed last year.
The original story and its central characters – Scout, her brother Jem and their lawyer father Atticus – are known and loved by millions of readers around the world.
But many have been left “baffled and distressed” at the revelation the new book paints Atticus as a racist “bigot” who went to a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
Fans around the country spent the night camped outside stores as strict rules prevented copies of the novel going on sale any earlier than midnight.
Waterstones in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street opened at midnight while its sister store in Argyle Street held a screening of To Kill A Mockingbird at the Grosvenor Cinema, with cinema-goers able to pick up the book after the showing.
Ashleigh O’Connell was first in line to get a copy at Waterstones’ Piccadilly store, having arrived at 6pm to get her spot.
Ms O’Connell was “sceptical” when she first heard about the follow-up.
She said: “To Kill A Mockingbird is so perfect I know it is not going to be the same so I am trying to see it as separate.”
Go Set A Watchman revolves around the now-adult Scout’s return to her native Alabama from New York to visit her father.
Fan Valerie Walcott, 52, who was counting down the hours until midnight, said she understood Lee’s decision to portray Atticus as imperfect, adding: “There’s absolutely no way that he cannot be a product of his environment.”
Author Joanna Trollope, who took part in a panel discussion at the Piccadilly launch, urged readers to be “grown up” in their understanding of the novel.
She said: “The thing about Mockingbird is we all think we own it and she wrote it for us and we read it privately. So we have got to let go of that.”
But another reviewer said it was “weighed down with literary references” and had “none of the skill” shown in Mockingbird. Book-lovers were quick to offer their reviews online, with one reader describing it as a “brilliantly written, beautiful southern novel about a young woman who discovers her father is not a god”.
Another wrote: “Go Set a Watchman is best viewed as a historical artefact – the first draft product of a talented young author. Its revelations should be viewed as such. It was never really intended to be a true companion piece to Mockingbird.”