Harper Lee’s new novel sells more than 1 mn copies in first week

The new novel by U.S. writer Harper Lee, “Go Set a Watchman,” in its first week on the market sold 1.1 million copies in the United States and Canada, the HarperCollins publishing house announced Monday.

The book, which breaks the publishing silence of 55 years on the part of the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” went on sale on July 14 and HarperCollins has already decided to expand the first edition to 3.3 million copies, the firm said in a communique.

“First week sales of ‘Go Set a Watchman’ have far exceeded our expectations,” HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray said in a statement. “We are thrilled to see readers responding to this historic new work from an iconic author like Harper Lee.”

In addition, HarperCollins has published more than 150,000 copies of the Spanishlanguage edition of the work for distribution in Latin America and Spain.

The novel, a sequel to the highlyacclaimed “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was written in the mid1950s that is to say, before the classic featuring Atticus Finch, but it had remained unpublished for decades.

The manuscript was discovered last autumn and the 89yearold author gave the green light for its publication, although the work has received mixed reactions, especially because it presents Finch, a hero in the earlier work, as a man of doubtful ethics after decades during which he was held up as a moral icon for millions of Americans.