HarperCollins revealed the cover for Go Set A Watchman, the highly anticipated second novel from Harper Lee. It looks a bit familiar, as it should, taking a couple of hints from the iconic To Kill A Mockingbird cover.
The cover shows a tree in the foreground, standing by train tracks, with a train coming toward the viewer. Lee’s name and the title of the novel are in the same font used for the Mockingbird cover.
“It draws on the style of the decade the book was written,” HarperCollins president Michael Morrison told People.
Go Set A Watchman is more like an early draft of Mockingbird than a true sequel. Initially, she wrote about an older Scout returning to Maycomb to visit her father, Atticus Finch, but her publisher suggested writing a novel from the perspective of a young Scout. The events in Watchman, which was written in the mid 1950s, are set 20 years after Mockingbird.
The “new” book was announced with much fanfare in February 2015, although there was some concern about how involved Lee was in the decision to publish it.
HarperCollins plans to publish 2 million copies of Watchman. It will be available in stores on July 14.
cover from HarperCollins