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Go Set a Watchman

A Novel
Pages
288
Published
2015
Language
English

Synopsis

Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, now twenty-six and living in New York, returns to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama for a visit. Set in the 1950s against the tensions of the early civil rights era, her homecoming turns unsettling when she discovers her father, Atticus, attending a meeting of a segregationist citizens' council.

Confronted with a version of Atticus that contradicts the moral compass she grew up with, Jean Louise is forced to separate her own conscience from her father's example and reckon with a hometown, and a parent, that are more complicated than she remembered.

Written before To Kill a Mockingbird but set roughly twenty years later, this novel was Harper Lee's first draft of the Finch family's story — published in 2015 as a literary event, decades after her classic.

How it reads

Prose complexity 7/10
Content warnings (1)
Racism