"Go Set A Watchman" is the second novel by Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird. It was released in 2015, 55 years after the release of her first book. It was supposedly written first, with To Kill A Mockingbird being a prequel of sorts to it. but may have been edited in the intervening five decades.
"Go Set A Watchman" was very successful upon its release, selling some one million copies in its first week of sale. Much of the interest in the book was in its revisionist take on some of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, primarily Atticus Finch. To talk about "To Set A Watchman", we have to talk about "To Kill A Mockingbird", and more precisely, to the fact that it has gathered a central place in the literature curriculum of United States' high schools. The book has become so central, being one of the main works that everyone is exposed to, that is is almost possible to forget that it was ever written by a real person (partly due to the author's reclusive nature). It reads more like a fable, like a universal tale of childhood, with almost mythic figures, that it is easy to forget that it was written by a real person, in a real historic context. Its views on social justice, which can somewhat tritely be boiled down to the fact that people are all the same, and we should try to be decent to everyone, are so universal that they have been swallowed by generation for their truth and poignancy.
And what Harper Lee has done in this short book is undermine the foundations of her classic. She presents a book where Scout Finch, as an adult, learns that she has irreconcilable differences with the people she grew up with, and that her father, beneath his air of decency and justice, is still a racist. I don't know why Harper Lee chose to release this book half a century later: whether it was due to external political considerations about the South's refusal to change, whether it was due to a desire to see the complete story published in her lifetime, or whether it is some very elaborate literary troll, what Harper Lee has done is totally rewrite an American classic.
It is hard to read this book on its own, instead of as a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, but it is certainly a good book on its own. The tone of To Kill A Mockingbird could almost be twee, with its childlike faith in authority and universal messages. "Go Set A Watchman" has a more cynical, snarky tone, as it is told through the eyes of an adult, and an unhappy adult at that. The book also goes quickly, being around 250 pages, told at a conversational pace. Whatever the merits of this book on its own, however, it will probably be remembered as the book that rewrote To Kill A Mockingbird.