To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee announced she would be releasing a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird this summer – 55 years after her debut. Go Set a Watchman, completed in the mid-50s but lost for more than half a century, was written before To Kill A Mockingbird and features Scout as an adult

Guardian

No one ever forgets this book

Independent

Someone rare has written this very fine novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life and the warmest, most authentic humour. A touching book; and so funny, so likeable

Truman Capote

There is humour as well as tragedy in this book, besides its faint note of hope for human nature; and it is delightfully written

Sunday Times

When I first read it at 11...I loved that the narrator was a girl with the marvellously un-girly name of Scout. I loved her unsentimental nature, her sharp tongue, her volubility, and her humour... The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre. Harper Lee's triumph is one of those.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Guardian

The way in which Lee weaves the book into its whole is magical and effortless. I read the book to my daughters last year, when they were the same age as Scout and Jem, and they fell in love with it, as I did before them. Today, my ten-year-old has gone to Youth Club with a printout of her heroes: Obama, her brother, and Harper Lee.

Roshi Fernando, Independent

A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere eighteen ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird

The Washington Post, 1961

I think it is our national novel

Oprah Winfrey