WASHINGTON — Call it a book-club bombshell. Harper Lee, author of the great American novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has announced she plans to release a new book.
Fifty-five years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning story hit bookstore shelves, Lee is the topic of conversation around the New Fiction table at Politics and Prose, in Northwest.
“Every literary geek in the world is basically going ‘eeee,'” says store manager Angela Spring.
She’s thrilled to learn the author will follow her beloved characters in the sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” that was actually written before it.
“I like the idea Harper Lee had an idea of Scout as an adult before she wrote about Scout as a child,” Spring says.
The author, who has stayed out of the limelight living in a small town in Georgia all these years, had said she would never write another book. Technically, she didn’t.
“She had written the manuscript and she thought it was lost. And a friend of hers found it. And that she’s consented to release it, that’s a great story, isn’t it?” says Gigi Bradford, former literature director for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Now the chair of the Folger poetry board, Bradford leads a poetry group at the bookstore.
“To learn she’d written a book before ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ about characters in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Scout particularly, as an adult, that’s very exciting. Everyone can’t wait to read it,” Bradford says.
Two million copies of the 304-page book, entitled “Go Set a Watchman,” are set for release July 14, according to the publisher.
