GO SET A WATCHMAN: cover revealed

Back in February we all found out that Harper Lee, long considered perhaps the best one-book author of all time, would in fact, decades after the brilliant courtroom thriller TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, publish a second novel. Given that many of the crime writers I've interviewed over the past few years point to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD as a seminal book in their reading and writing development, this was huge news for anyone who loves the genre.

Today, the UK and Commonwealth cover for the new book, GO SET A WATCHMAN, has been revealed. Lee's sophomore novel (doesn't that seem like a ridiculous term in this completely unique situation?) will be published by William Heinemann, the original publishers of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in the UK back in 1960 (Harper were the US publishers). Here's the blurb for the rediscovered book:

Go Set a Watchman is set during the mid-1950s and features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.

Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She attended Huntingdon College and studied law at the University of Alabama. She is the author of To Kill a Mockingbird and has been awarded numerous literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

GO SET A WATCHMAN will be published in hardback and ebook on 14 July 2015.