The news that Harper Lee is publishing a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird is wonderful and extremely unexpected. It's up there with the knowledge that Johnny Depp used to sell ball point pens and Hugh Jackman was once a PE teacher: surprising and thrilling.
Lee's new novel, Go Set A Watchman, picks up 20 years after the events chronicled in Mockingbird, featuring a grown-up NewYork-based Scout who returns to Alabama to visit her lawyer father, Atticus.
88-year-old Lee actually wrote the sequel before her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, but has kept quiet about it for 55 years. The manuscript was uncovered by a close friend of Lee's recently and the author says she is 'humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.'
We will be forming an orderly queue on the book's 14 July release date – probably behind Victoria Beckham, who named her daughter Harper, after the famed author (prompting an astonishing 123% rise in sales of To Kill A Mockingbird on Amazon.co.uk back in 2011).
