Harper Lee book flies out of stores — to mixed reviews

Harper Lee’s second novel flew out of stores Tuesday in one of the most eagerly anticipated book releases in modern publishing history and half a century after her masterpiece “To Kill a Mockingbird” hit the shelves. In Lee’s hometown of Monroeville in Alabama, where the 89-year-old lives in strict privacy at a nursing home, queues stretched out of bookshop doors to snap up copies of “Go Set a Watchman,” and some stores in the United States and London opened at midnight for the occasion. The Ol’ Curiosities & Book Shoppe in Monroeville, which is selling special editions with embossed title pages, laid on a 12 a.m. launch party before reopening their doors to brisk morning trade.

We have so much going on right now and so many customers, we’ve got people out the door.

An employee at the Ol’ Curiosities & Book Shoppe

Bookshops courting die-hard Lee fans celebrated the big moment by laying on readings, talks and “Mockingbird” film screenings. Lee’s only previous novel is considered a 20th-century classic that defined racial injustice in the Depression-era South of the United States and became standard reading in classrooms across the world. The literary world was upended when HarperCollins announced in February that it was publishing a second novel, seemingly discovered from Lee’s safe-deposit box in still-unclear circumstances. Lee wrote the manuscript in the late 1950s, but her then editor suggested she recast the book from the childhood perspective of Scout, which in turn became “Mockingbird.”

Arts Harper Lee