Where to start with Harper Lee

American novelist, 1926–2016. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.

Best Harper Lee book to start with: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), on 11 of the 17 lists it could have made.

Harper Lee published two novels, and To Kill a Mockingbird is the one to begin with. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was shortlisted for the National Book Award the same year. A girl in a small Alabama town in the 1930s tells the story of her father, a lawyer, and the case he takes on, and it reads quickly from the first page. You can finish it in a few days.

Go Set a Watchman was published in 2015, more than fifty years later, and it is best read as a companion to the first book. It was written before Mockingbird and features the same characters as adults, and readers tend to respond to it quite differently. Read it second, once you have Mockingbird in your head.