Harper Lee is excited about new book, says agent after sceptics raise doubts

The news that the 88-year-old To Kill a Mockingbird author is to publish her second novel had sparked mounting concern about her level of involvement

Harper Lee receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W Bush in 2007. She has since suffered a stroke and is believed to be blind. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Alison Flood

Wednesday 4 February 2015  The Guardian

Harper Lee’s international rights agent has said that the 88-year-old author was in “great spirits and increasingly excited at the prospect of [her second] novel finally seeing the light of day” when he saw her in January, responding to mounting concerns over the publication of Go Set a Watchman this summer.

The news that Lee would be following up her beloved 1960 debut To Kill a Mockingbird with a second novel, featuring her child heroine Scout as an adult, took the literary world by storm on Tuesday. Lee, her publishers announced, wrote Go Set a Watchman in the 1950s, before To Kill a Mockingbird, but was advised by her editor to focus on the flashbacks it contained to Scout’s childhood. So she laid it aside and wrote the novel which would go on to sell 40m copies around the world, and Go Set a Watchman was apparently only recently rediscovered in a “secure location” by Lee’s lawyer Tonja Carter
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