To Kill A Mockingbird

Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.

Lawyer Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl.

Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s.

The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice.

But the weight of history will only tolerate so much...

A benchmark of classic American literature, *To Kill A Mockingbird* approaches the highly sensitive topic of racism in 1930s America with humour, warmth and compassion, making it widely recognised as one of the best books of the twentieth century and in American literature. [*Go Set a Watchman*](/book/go-set-a-watchman/harper-lee/9781784752460), released in 2015, 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. After *To Kill a Mockingbird* was published in 1960, Harper Lee set aside *Go Set a Watchman*, and never returned to it. The original manuscript of the novel was considered to have been lost until the autumn of 2014, when Tonja Carter discovered it in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of *To Kill a Mockingbird*.