Harper Lee attorney suggests ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ author may have written a third novel

While Go Set A Watchman is poised to become the biggest-selling book of the decade, there is news that To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee might have written a third novel.

The revelation came in a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Tonja B. Carter, Lee’s attorney, who wrote about how the manuscript for Watchman was discovered. In it, Carter wrote that she found the Watchman text “underneath a stack of significant number of pages of another typed text.”

Carter teased that experts will be invited by Lee, now 89, to look over the other typed pages that were found in a safe-deposit box.

“What of the other pages that have for decades sat in the Lord & Taylor box on top of Watchman?” Carter wrote. “Was it an earlier draft of Watchman, or of Mockingbird, or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two? I don’t know.”

Go Set A Watchman will be released on Tuesday. The book was actually written before Mockingbird and early reviews revealed that the book features a very different Atticus Finch. In it, an older Scout learns that her father is racist. Despite the revelation - or perhaps in spite of it - the book is the most pre-ordered on Amazon since 2007’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Prior to Watchman, Mockingbird was Lee’s only published novel.

cover from HarperCollins