Books

'Go Set A Watchman' Book Cover Revealed On Amazon

by Kathleen Culliton

You cannot judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty damn excited about it. Especially when the book in question is the one you've been waiting for ever since you first read of the tired old town where ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps. So get excited. The jacket cover for Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was revealed on Amazon this Saturday morning.

Paul Bogaards, a PR rep from Knopf, was the first to spot the simple new cover, with it's creamy colored base, black, scratchy font, and a splash of lime green. (Which I think represents the electric joy we all feel when we see those magic words, 'Harper Lee'.) He immediately tweeted:

Amazon UK has also posted some hints about the content of the new book. They have posted a blurb written by the book's publishers in the United Kingdom, Cornerstone Digital.

“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. An instant classic.”

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird after her publishers read Go Set A Watchman and suggested she rework it with a nine-year-old Scout as a narrator. In an interview with International Business Times, Lee biographer Charles J. Shields theorized that the sequel's title is a reference Atticus – the watchman who protected Tom Robinson from the town's baser impulses.

When the release of Watchman was first announced, fans and readers worried that Lee, now 88-years-old and not in the best of health, had been bullied into the idea. But in a statement given to her publishers, the author told her readers,

"She is alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions of Watchman."

Even though Go Set A Watchman won’t be released until July 14 of this year, the book is already making money. Not only has Watchman hit the top of Amazon’s best seller list, but To Kill a Mockingbird sales have seen a major boost as well.