Harper Lee’s new novel ‘most ordered since Harry Potter’

NEW YORK: “Go Set a Watchman,” the much-anticipated second novel by “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee, is the most pre-ordered print title on Amazon.com since the last book in the “Harry Potter” series, Amazon said on Thursday.
The online retailer said the novel, to be published on July 14, 55 years after Lee’s classic “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was already the No. 1 best-selling book on the website.
It is the most pre-ordered book on Amazon.com since J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” in 2007 — the seventh and final novel about the British teenage boy wizard.
Amazon did not provide figures for either book but publisher Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, said it had ordered an initial US print run of 2 million for “Go Set a Watchman.”
Harper astonished the literary world in February when it announced it would publish a book that only a few people knew existed. Harper said at the time that the manuscript came to light recently after Lee’s lawyer discovered it in a safety deposit box with the original manuscript of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
It was written in the 1950s before Lee, now 89 and in an assisted-living facility in her home state of Alabama, penned her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece. She then largely retired from public life.