Secrecy over text of Go Set a Watchman means publishers can only read in person at London agent’s offices – but 25 territories are already signed up

It was written almost 60 years ago, but Harper Lee’s forthcoming new novel Go Set a Watchman is one of the hottest properties of this week’s London Book Fair, with foreign publishers queuing up to catch a glimpse.



The title page of the Go Set a Watchman manuscript. Photograph: PR

The 88-year-old author’s literary agent Andrew Nurnberg announced this morning, as one of the world’s biggest book trade events opened its doors in west London’s Olympia, that the novel had now sold in 25 different territories, from Korea to Montenegro, China, Bulgaria and Turkey. Nurnberg’s team are in the middle of negotiating further deals, and “many, many more” are expected to be announced in the run-up to Go Set a Watchman’s English-language publication in July, three months from today.

The process is slower than with the majority of manuscripts, as secrecy around the novel’s contents is high. Rather than being posted or emailed the novel, foreign publishers have had to travel to Andrew Nurnberg Associates’ London offices to read the manuscript under what its UK publisher William Heinemann described as “very tight security”.

Releasing the first image of the title page – which gives little away other than Lee’s address at the time of completing the novel in the mid-1950s – William Heinemann said the book had only been read by a “handful” of people so far.

Nurnberg told trade magazine Publishers Weekly earlier this year that “we don’t wish to sell this book blind ... Not least because there has been a fair amount of nonsense in the press by a few people who seem determined to question the motivation of selling it, and to belittle its literary merits, without having read a single word.”

He added that those editors who have seen the work have been “highly moved by the text”, calling the novel “a fine book on every level. That it was still there and discovered is a miracle.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cover design for Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. Photograph: Penguin Random House/PA

Featuring an adult Scout returning to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, and “grapp[ling] 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”, according to its publishers, Go Set a Watchman was laid aside in the 1950s in favour of To Kill a Mockingbird when Lee’s editor persuaded her to write a novel from the perspective of the young Scout.

Announcing plans for its publication earlier this year, Lee said: “I hadn’t realised it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”

Her motivations for publishing the novel have since been called into question, with investigators in Alabama looking into allegations that the elderly author, who resides in a nursing home in Monroeville, had been a victim of elder abuse. The allegations have since been declared “unfounded” by the Alabama department of human resources, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.