The woman who discovered the manuscript of Go Set a Watchmn, Tonia B. Carter, Harper Lee’s lawyer, has published a story in the Wall Street Journal, “How I Found the Harper Lee Manuscript,” to she says, “tell the full story, fill in any blanks that may be in people’s minds, and provide a historical context for those interested in how this book went from lost to being found.”

The story refutes the July 2 report by the New York Times that she may have seen the  manuscript earlier than claimed, but the real surprise comes at the end when she hints that there may be a third book. Returning to the safe deposit box where Go Set A Watchman was discovered, she says she has found pages that may be “an earlier draft of Watchman, or of  Mockingbird, or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two.”

She adds that she doesn’t know, but “In the coming months, experts, at Nelle’s [Lee’s first name, used by family and friends] direction, will be invited to examine and authenticate all the documents in the safe-deposit box.”

Supposedly under tight security unitl its release on Tuesday, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman has found its way into a remarkable number of reviewers’ hands. The tide now seems to be turning from the initial “Say its isn’t so” at the discovery of a racist Atticus Finch to, as Time magazine’s headline declares, “Atticus Finch’s Racism Makes Scout, and Us, Grow Up.”

In the New York Times review on Friday, Michiko Kakutani asked, “How could the saintly Atticus  … suddenly emerge as a bigot?”

The Wall Street Journal offers an explanation by examining the model for Atticus Finch, Harper Lee’s father:

Ms. Lee’s father was indeed a segregationist, according to people who knew him and according to Charles J. Shields, author of the biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. But while his daughter was at work on Mockingbird, Mr. Lee had a change of heart that moved him to advocate for integration. Mr. Shields said Mr. Lee’s late-in-life shift could explain the transformation of Atticus through the author’s drafts from a bigot in Watchman to a civil-rights hero in Mockingbird and why in interviews after Mockingbird she spoke glowingly of her father. “She may have been very proud of him,” Mr. Shields said.

Poet laureate Natasha Trethewey, the only African American to review the book so far, says in the Washington Post that Watchman reveals uncomfortable truths:

…the paradox at the heart of Watchman that many white Americans still cannot or will not comprehend: that one can at once believe in the ideal of “justice for all” — as Atticus once purported to — and yet maintain a deeply ingrained and unexamined notion of racial difference now based in culture as opposed to biology, a milder yet novel version of white supremacy manifest in, for example, racial profiling, unfair and predatory lending practices, disparate incarceration rates, residential and school segregation, discriminatory employment practices and medical racism.

Calling Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, “a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of To Kill a Mockingbird” the Wall Street Journal reviews the book that was supposed to be under heavy security until its release on Tuesday, following those from the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani and the one in USA Today, concluding, “for the millions who hold that novel dear, Go Set a Watchman will be a test of their tolerance and capacity for forgiveness.”

None of the three publications have explained how they acquired their copies.

The daily New York Times has just released a review by the formidable Michiko Kakutani  of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, which was supposed to be under heavy security until its release on Tuesday. It’s a review that will crush those hoping for another masterpiece.

Although Watchman is both a precursor, in that it was written first, and a sequel to Lee’s beloved To Kill a Mockingbird, in that it is set after that book, Kakutani says this is a much different story, and will leave readers wondering,

How did a lumpy tale about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father? How did a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech  … mutate into a redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement, hailed, in the words of the former civil rights activist and congressman Andrew Young, for giving us “a sense of emerging humanism and decency”?

Kakutani does not reveal how she got the book.

UPDATE: USA Today also reviews the book and comes to a similar conclusion, “it’s troubling to see the great, saintly Atticus diminished.” but counters, “If you think of Watchman as a young writer’s laboratory, however, it provides valuable insight into the generous, complex mind of one of America’s most important authors.” USA Today also does not explain how they acquired their copy.

You can now read the first chapter of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, coming out on Tuesday, and listen to a sample of Reese Witherspoon reading the audiobook, from the Wall Street Journal:

Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’: Read the First Chapter

Both are also available from the Guardian.

Exclusive extract, Chapter one, Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

The WSJ also reports on the “extreme security measures” in place for the book’s rollout to libraries and bookstores in more than 70 countries (it appears shrink-wrapping counts as an “extreme measure”).

Buzz has been building for Julia Pierpont’s debut novel Among the Ten Thousand Things (Random House; Random House Audio; OverDrive Sample). Called by Vanity Fair “one of the most anticipated books of the year” based on the manuscript being sold at auction for an estimated six figures in 2012, it carries a cover blurb by Jonathan Safran Foer, “This book is among the funniest, and most emotionally honest, I’ve read in a long time.”

Libraries ordered conservatively, holds are building and many are going back for reorders.

We covered the book last week, pointing out Entertainment Weekly’s praise, which has since been followed by attention from some other heavy hitters.

Described in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Book Review as “a novel about a family blown apart and yet still painfully tethered together” by Helen Schulman whose own novels have also explored modern marital relationships, the review begins, “In some cases, the key to the success of a longstanding marriage may not be in its well-kept secrets but in its tacit agreements.” She calls the author “a blazingly talented young author whose prose is so assured and whose observations are so precise and deeply felt that it’s almost an insult to bring up her age,” which she then does in the very next sentence, “At 28, Pierpont has a preternatural understanding of the vulnerabilities of middle age and the vicissitudes of a long marriage, the habits of being.”

She also credits the author with creating an “an audacious structural move … about half of the way through, when she jumps ahead into the future, leaving no questions about the resolution of this story unanswered. It’s an injection of omniscience reminiscent of Jennifer Egan or Milan Kundera, and it makes the unfolding of what follows more riveting in a slow-mo, rubbernecking way.”

It is the top pick on Oprah’s “Dazzling New Beach Reads” list, called a “twisty, gripping story … [that] packs an emotional wallop.”

The Huffington Post’s “Bottom Line” puts Pierpont in the same company as Virginia Woolf: “Though comparisons to Virginia Woolf will necessarily place most contemporary novels in the shadow of her genius, Among the Ten Thousand Things carries through the late author’s spirit, if not her revolutionary style.”

The Vanity Fair story mentioned above all but anoints Pierpont’s book as the summer’s have-to-read, saying it is “a big, beating heart that soars,” summarizing its draw in glowing terms:

Against a summer smorgasbord of stories about syrupy flings or crime dramas, Among the Ten Thousand Things rises above for its imagined structure, sentence-by-sentence punch, and pure humanity . . .  Pierpont has written a debut so honest and mature that it will resonate with even the most action-hungry readers—perhaps against reason. Her story is the one we’ll be talking about this summer, and well beyond.

How is this for an endorsement? “Summerlong (Harper/Ecco; Dreamscape; OverDrive Sample) is the Great White Midlife Crisis novel that Jonathan Franzen has tried to write (and failed) and Jonathan Lethem has tried to write (and failed) and Michael Chabon (wisely) half-avoided ever trying to write.”

That is how Jason Sheehan describes Dean Bakopoulos’s newest novel in his NPR review.

The story about a marriage on the rocks told with humor and unflinching candor is getting acclaim from several other notable book sources and could become one of the “it” books of the summer.

It is already among Oprah’s favorite “Dazzling New Beach Reads” and gets the nod from The Washington Post’s Ron Charles as well.

The folks at Oprah say Bakopoulos is “masterful when it comes to imagining the ways that we all long to cut loose from our everyday obligations.”

While Charles remarks that the novel is “sexy but surprisingly poignant” and that “Bakopoulos’s greatest talent is his ability to mix ribald comedy with heartfelt sorrow… finding out how these desperate dreamers get through their summer of love and lovelessness will make your own even more refreshing.”

It is Sheehan’s NPR’s review, however, that gives the best sense of the reading experience: “Do not read this book if you are unhappy. It will kill you. … Don’t read it if you’re sad. Don’t read it if you’re restless. … Don’t read it if, sometimes, you wake late at night and think of just slipping away in the dark, calculating how far away you’d be before anyone knew you were gone because if you do, Summerlong will take you down with it, man. It will break you.”

Holds in libraries are rising on light ordering.

The Wall Street Journal will post the first chapter of Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, plus a sample of Reese Witherspoon reading the audiobook, this Friday, four days in advance of the book’s publication. In the U.K., the excerpts will be published by the Guardian.

The chapter will also be discussed on the WSJ Book Club Facebook page.

For an amusing take on the promotion campaign for the book, check out the discussion between Peter Bart, Variety’s former editor-in-chief and Mike Fleming, also formerly of Variety and now at Deadline. Says Bart,  “How do you sell a (sort of) sequel to the great To Kill a Mockingbird when you have no star to promote it (Gregory Peck is long gone) and Harper Lee, age 89, hasn’t been seen in public in sixty years.”

It may seem hopelessly old-fashioned to the Hollywood crowd, but, according to the New York Times, bookstore promotions include “read-a-thons, midnight openings, film screenings, Southern food and discussion groups.”

It seemed that the controversies about the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman had been laid to rest, but this afternoon the New York Times reports that questions have come up about  whether the manuscript was a “stumbled on” last August as had been claimed, or if it was actually discovered in 2011.

The timing is important to those that fear that Lee, now 89 and nearly deaf and blind, was manipulated into agreeing to the book’s publication. In 2011, Lee’s sister and protector Alice was still alive. If the discovery been revealed, she may have taken steps to prevent its publication.

It’s unlikely this will have any impact on the book’s release, set for July 14. The state of Alabama has already ruled against complaints that Lee was coerced and reported that she was in fact happy to hear so many people are interested in reading the book.

On Fresh Air yesterday author Vendela Vida spoke with Terry Gross about her new novel The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (Harper/Ecco; HighBridge; OverDrive Sample), one of the show’s early summer reading picks.

The novel, about a woman’s unraveling identity, has received admiring reviews in local and national papers, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the daily New York Times and the Sunday Book Review.

As a result, holds are spiking in some places and are generally outpacing fairly light ordering.

If you need a way to describe the story, check out these takes:

• Entertainment Weekly, which gave the book a B+, offers a bang-up summary: “Vida’s twisting, feverish novel may be slim, but it’s full of intrigue, betrayal, and enough mysterious doppelgängers to overwhelm even Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany.”

• The Huffington Post’s “Bottom Line” says it is for readers “interested in feminist literature, funny stories, and spare plots that’ll make your heart race.”

• The LA Times describes it as “a page-turning thriller with a subtle, satirical bent.”

Albert Camus’s classic novel The Stranger includes a scene in which the anti-hero, Meursault, shoots a nameless Arab while walking along a beach in Algeria.

In his debut novel The Meursault Investigation (Other Press; OverDrive Sample), Algerian writer Kamel Daoud gives the murdered man a name. It is Musa. He had a family in Daoud’s retelling, a mother and father and critically, a brother named Harun.

It is Harun who tells Musa’s story, one that creatively echoes and challenges the story of The Stranger and expands it, and the history of Algeria, in complex and incisive ways.

Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account, a finalist Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 2015, reviews The Meursault Investigation for the cover of the NYT Sunday Book Review, saying that literary retellings must be “so convincing and so satisfying that we no longer think of the original story as the truth, but rather come to question it … Daoud has done exactly this. Not only does he use an indigenous voice to retell the story of The Stranger, he offers a different account of the murder and makes Algeria more than just a setting for existential questions posed by a French novelist. For Daoud, Algeria is the existential question.”

Heller McAlpin, writing for NPR, says “What begins as a reproach to The Stranger for marginalizing ‘the second most important character in the book’ becomes a lament for Algeria’s long battle for independence, first from French colonists and subsequently from authoritarian Islamism.”

Additional attention has come from The LA Times “Jacket Copy”, The New Yorker, The Millions, and The NYT Magazine. It is also an Indie Next pick for June and won France’s Prix Goncourt award for “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.”

For libraries that have ordered it, holds are heavy on light ordering.

Emily St. John Mandel has won the Arthur C. Clarke award, recognizing the best in Science Fiction, for her bestselling novel Station Eleven (RH/Knopf; RH & BOT Audio; Thorndike; OverDrive Sample).

The book, a post-apocalyptic tale that weaves back and forth in time as it follows the fate of several characters while also exploring the sustaining power of art, has racked up a litany of accolades.

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, it was picked as one of the Favorite of Favorites by LibraryReads, and made multiple best books of the year lists including Entertainment Weekly’s which selected it as their #1 pick.

As we reported, George R.R. Martin is on the bandwagon too, lobbying fans to support it for the Hugo award.

The genre categorization doesn’t sit well with Mandel. Responding to a review in the Washington Post’s “Science Fiction and Fantasy” column she told Ron Charles,

I was surprised to discover that if you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer … my only objection to these categories is that when you have a book like mine that doesn’t fit neatly into any category, there’s a real risk that readers who only read “literary fiction” won’t pick it up because they think they couldn’t possibly like sci-fi, while sci-fi readers will pick up the book based on the sci-fi categorization, and then be disappointed because the book isn’t sci-fi enough.

On the other hand, this offers readers advisors an opportunity to use Station Eleven to expand both SF and literary readers’ horizons.

Check your holds, they  are heavy in some libraries and trade paperback edition is scheduled for June 2,

Check your holds on Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample), announced today as  the second pick in NPR’s Morning Edition Book Club.

NPR asks a well-known writer to select each book for the club and to explain the reasons for that choice on the show. Gillian Flynn did the honors for this one, saying that Atkinson exhibits a “vast humanity for her characters, [an] incredible empathy… and is an author that can make readers weep on one page and laugh on the next.”

A God in Ruins is a companion of sorts to the bestselling Life After Life, (Hachette/Little, Brown OverDrive Sample), following a character from the first book, Ursula Todd’s younger brother Teddy. It is the story of a life strongly affected by war and is told through three generations – Teddy, his daughter, and grandchildren.

Flynn says readers will enjoy dissecting the book’s many characters and will have differing opinions about them, making it a good book group pick.

NPR provides a reading guide and instructions on how to post questions and comments via Facebook, Instagram and  Twitter  (using #morningeditionbookclub). Atkinson will appear on Morning Edition June 16^th to answer those questions and discuss the book.

A God in Ruins follows Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories Of 33 Men Buried In A Chilean Mine And The Miracle That Set Them Free by Hector Tobar (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample). As we reported, the push from NPR helped that nonfiction account take off. A movie based on the story, titled The 33, starring Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche and Gabriel Byrne will be released November 13.

God Help the Child (RH/Knopf; RH and BOT Audio; OverDrive Sample), Toni Morrison’s new book, arrives at the end of the month. She is featured on the cover of the upcoming New York Times Magazine.

In a story that is part ode, part biography,
part call to arms, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah discusses Morrison’s aura, her writing and editing, and her reception by the publishing world, one dominated by people who
do not look like her.

“The perplexing but wonderful thing about Morrison’s career is just how much her prominence was created not by the mainstream publishing world, but by Morrison herself, on her own terms, in spite of it.”

The article starts with Morrison’s recording session for the Random House/BOT audio of God Help the Child. The NYT provides a video interview with a sample of the reading, which proves her skills as a narrator.

Books on Tape has also created a special landing page for the audiobook, announcing that Morrison will also record unabridged editions of her earlier books, Paradise and Song of Solomon, both audios to be published in 2016.

Below a longer clip from the audio.

The taint has been lifted from the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman,(Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe; HarperCollins Español; HarperCollins Español Audio; eBook) set for July 14.

On Friday, the Alabama officials looking into the case announced that accusations of elder abuse against Lee are unfounded. They declined to comment further. Due to confidentiality agreements, their findings will not be released. This followed the closing last month of the state’s investigation into fraud against Lee.

The novel will be released as an eBook as well as downloadable audio. It was only last year that Lee finally agreed to releasing To Kill a Mockingbird digitally.

It will also be available in Spanish-language print and audio editions, titled, Ve y pon un centinela.

Holds on all formats are reaching The Girl on the Train levels.