To Kill A Mockingbird

'Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.'

Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl.

No one ever forgets this book

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

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

It would be difficult to argue that Harper Lee's classic isn't one of the most - if not the most - beloved of American novels

The enduring appeal of Mockingbird lies not only int he plot or characters; the book is a mirror, a source of endless and revelatory conversation about who we are and have been as a country

The names Scout and Atticus - and, perhaps above all, the name Harper - reflect a respect not just for the arc of history, but for the hope that it does indeed bend toward justice

A first novel of such rare excellence

Novels like To Kill a Mockingbird enlarge the heart and inspire the mind. They have the power uplift readers and enrich them - no matter where those readers live or how they worship or the color of their skin

The rare classic that speaks to all ages about the less triumphant aspects of American history

A seminal American story, a touchstone of radical tolerance .. The book is a marvel, brilliantly structured, wonderfully told in the voice of Scout Finch, a stand-in for its tomboyish author as a child ... It's a book determined to make young readers feel like grownups ... and grownups feel like children

Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She is the author of the acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird, originally published in 1960; and Go Set a Watchman, published in July 2015. Ms Lee received the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and numerous other literary awards and honours. She died in 2016.