The Guardian is exclusively publishing the first chapter of Harper Lee’s hotly anticipated companion novel to To Kill a Mockingbird
- Read the first chapter
- Listen to an extract read by Reese Witherspoon
Jean Louise Finch – beloved heroine of one of the most beloved novels of the modern age – has, in just the first few pages of Harper Lee’s wildly anticipated second novel Go Set A Watchman, been kissed hard, batted away a marriage proposal and revealed that one of To Kill a Mockingbird’s major characters has “dropped dead” in their tracks.
Last seen as the tomboy nicknamed Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise is now an adult. “She had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being … She still moved like a 13-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment … She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person,” writes Lee as Go Set a Watchman opens. She is on her way back to her hometown of Maycomb from New York to see her father Atticus, the hero of Lee’s 1960 novel, now an ailing 72-year-old.
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Last seen as the tomboy nicknamed Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise is now an adult. “She had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being … She still moved like a 13-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment … She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person,” writes Lee as Go Set a Watchman opens. She is on her way back to her hometown of Maycomb from New York to see her father Atticus, the hero of Lee’s 1960 novel, now an ailing 72-year-old.
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1 comment:
Goodness me, they've gone way overboard on that chapter up. Moving trains, and sounds of trains, and you can listen to Reese Witherspoon read the chapter, and ... all too much.
Plus you can't turn off the sound of the damned train when you're reading. All they needed to do was stick the text up.
The hyped marketing around this novel is going to get annoying I reckon.
Hey, Friday wine night Graham!
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