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Atticus Finch is racist in 'Go Set a Watchman' and people can't handle it

Harper Lee's new novel 'Go Set A Watchman' has upset fans of her first book 'To Kill A Mockingbird', which gave the world a hero in the form of Atticus Finch, a principled and compassionate lawyer who defends a black man falsley accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama.

People buy 'Go Set A Watchman' by Harper Lee shortly after midnight at Foyles book shop on July 14,2015 in London.

It's set twenty years after the trial, when Finch's now-adult daughter Scout returns home from New York to find her elderly father has transformed into a bitter, racist old man who has attended Ku Klux Klan meetings.

Harper Lee is one of the most reclusive figures in literature: she rarely gives interviews and never wrote another book after the success of her first, which was published in 1960.

Harper Lee

News of another, "lost" novel, sparked both excitement and confusion when it was reported earlier this year and there were suggestions that 89-year-old Lee had been pressured into publishing - although she issued a statement saying she was as "happy as hell" about it.

'Go Set A Watchman' was not written as a sequel to 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. It is actually a first draft of the book that was rejected by Lee's publisher and reworked into the story that became her first novel. It is the "more radical, ambitious and politicised of the two novels" Lee has now published.

Some people have said that the reason Lee shunned public life and never published anything else until now is because she could never follow up on her debut work. But maybe, just maybe, Lee is trying to make a point with this more nuanced and uncomfortable picture of Atticus?

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