Jaine Blackman is surprised by a long-awaited “sequel” to a much-loved classic

When a special reading group hosted by Waterstones in Oxford meets next week to discuss the long awaited “second” book by To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee, they’ll have plenty to talk about.

Having avoided all the pre-publication hype and early reviews of Go Set A Watchman, I read the book with little idea of what to expect other than it featured the same characters as the earlier work.

I wanted to judge it on its own merits, so also decided against re-visiting her classic, published in 1960.

At the beginning of Watchman, with 26-year-old Jean Louise “Scout” Finch returning from New York to visit her ageing father Atticus in Maycomb, Alabama, it’s easy to just take it as a coming of age tale of a young woman torn between city life and her home town in the deep South.

It’s certainly evocative of a bygone era, having been written in the 1950s. So far, so so-so.

But about halfway through, a bombshell is dropped which will leave anyone who has read To Kill A Mockingbird or seen the movie, starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer who defends a black man against an undeserved rape charge, reeling.

From then on you can’t help but look on that differently, and I’ll definitely be re-reading it now.

Go Set A Watchman (a reference to conscience) was written before Mockingbird and Lee was told by a publisher to instead concentrate on an incident which features in a flashback in it.

She did and the classic was born.

This “sequel” may upset some – possibly a lot – of that book’s admirers but I found it far more honest and mature about the complexity of racism in the South.

Scout is certainly all grown up and so is this writing.

Often uncomfortable reading, and sometimes even a little dull, it nevertheless is a striking book.

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee, William Heinemann, £18.99