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Lead book review

Go Set a Watchman should never have been hyped as a ‘landmark new novel’, says Philip Hensher

Harper Lee’s publishers are much to blame for resurrecting this piece of confused juvenilia. It should have remained where it belongs — in the bottom drawer

18 July 2015

9:00 AM

18 July 2015

9:00 AM

Go Set a Watchman Harper Lee

Heinemann, pp.288, £18.99, ISBN: 9781785150289

This is an interesting document, and a pretty bad novel. I don’t know why anyone thought it would be otherwise. In 1960, Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. It was an important statement, as well as a very good novel. Just as it took the southerner Lyndon B. Johnson to make the most significant civil rights concessions, so literary culture needed a novel written by a woman from the south saying all the right things about race in the firmest way possible.

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