Tag: Reading Challenges

Book Review – Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee #20BooksofSummer2025

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About the Book

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt.

Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past – a journey that can be guided only by one’s conscience.

Format: Hardcover (288 pages) Publisher: William Heinemann
Publication date: 14th July 2015 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

When it was first published, Go Set A Watchman was trailed as the sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird given the events take place around fifteen years after those in To Kill A Mockingbird. Pretty soon, however, it was recognised that Go Set A Watchman was a first draft of a novel written before To Kill A Mockingbird and – like all first drafts – never intended for publication. It can be considered as a ‘first go’ at what eventually would become To Kill A Mockingbird with the narrator changed from an older to a younger Scout.

If, like me, you’ve read To Kill A Mockingbird or watched the film adaptation starring Gregory Peck, it’s difficult not to draw comparisons with that book when reading Go Set A Watchman. Nevertheless I tried to approach Go Set A Watchman as a novel in its own right. I’m not sure I succeeded.

The reader accompanies Jean Louise Finch on one of her periodic visits back to Maycomb, the small town in Alabama where she grew up. She finds things changed: her father Atticus is now crippled with arthritis, her aunt has moved in to be his carer, and Calpurnia, the black woman who acted as her surrogate mother, has left the household. Her childhood friend, Hank, is still in love with her and wants to marry her but she can think of him now only with affection, something she feels is not enough to sustain a marriage. Maycomb’s small town mentality is a stark contrast to Jean Louise’s life in New York and her overriding feeling is of not fitting in.

The backdrop to the book is the civil rights movement. In particular, the attempts by the the NACCP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to end racial segregation and the disenfranchisement of black people. I confess a lot of the detail about Supreme Court decisions and how this impacted the jurisdiction of individual states went over my head but I can see it would have had relevance to readers at the time.

Through various characters, the author shows us people’s different responses to issues of race: outright hatred and vitriolic abuse, concern about the speed of change and pragmatic acceptance of the status quo. It makes Jean Louise, with her openminded views, feel even more of an outsider. Is she the one who’s wrong?

We get interludes in which Jean Louise recalls events from her childhood, including childish japes with her brother Jem and friends Henry (Hank) and Dill. There are some rather moving moments that demonstrate the challenges of growing up without a mother to guide you through things that only another woman can explain.

The funniest scene was the Coffee Morning which Jean Louise’s aunt arranges to mark her visit. Jean Louise tries to make polite conversation with the women invited but soon realises she has nothing in common with ‘the Newly Weds’, ‘the Diaper Set’, ‘the Light Brigade’ or ‘the Perennial Hopefuls’.

There were things I found difficult to ignore, such as the use of the term ‘Negroes’ to describe black people, although I accept this was common parlance at the time. I must admit I was very much in accord with Jean Louise when she confronts her father about his views on the enfranchisement of black people, which is essentially one day but not yet. On the other hand, perhaps he’s right that Jean Louise being ‘colourblind’ has made her unable to recognise the extent of the racism that black people still face in places like Maycomb.

Go Set A Watchman is a story about change and disillusionment. Jean Louise comes to realise that in regarding her father as her ‘watchman’ or moral compass, she’s absolved herself of the responsibility to be her own ‘watchman’. Her challenge is to accept him as a loving father at the same time as being passionately opposed to his views.

Go Set A Watchman is an interesting insight into the development of Harper Lee as a writer but, if you haven’t already, I’d suggest you read To Kill A Mockingbird and give this one a pass.

Go Set A Watchman is the third book from my 20 Books of Summer 2025 list. Yes, I have a way to go…

About the Author

Nelle Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. The author of the acclaimed To Kill A Mockingbird, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2017 and received numerous other literary awards and honours. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966).

Harper Lee died in 2016.

Book Review – The Last Apartment in Istanbul by Defne Suman

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About the Book

I was writing to her, so that she would know me not as this old person whose joints creaked when he rose from a chair, but as the real the man who dreamt, deceived, envied, loved…

Pericles Drakos has lived in the exquisite Circle Building for all of his seventy-five years. From its lofty windows, he has seen his little corner of Istanbul shift and transform. But as the area has become increasingly gentrified, Pericles has retreated into its shadowy corners. And when the pandemic hits, his isolation deepens.

But when Leyla, a sparky and beautiful thirty-something moves in, Pericles is enthralled. And when he discovers Leyla is a writer, he decides to put his own pen to paper and record his own fraught that of a Greek man subjected to the politics of oppression and intimidation in twentieth-century Turkey.

Format: Hardcover (400 pages) Publisher: Apollo
Publication date: 3rd July 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Although a Turkish citizen, Pericles Drakos is Greek Orthodox by descent. He’s lived in the same magnificent but now rather dilapidated apartment building, known as The Circle, all his life. Now the developers have moved into the area and are intent on removing the occupants, using whatever means necessary. They want to demolish the building to make way for luxury apartments. The Circle is one of the few remaining buildings left standing in this part of Istanbul, previously the hub of the Greek Orthodox community. As we learn more about Pericles’ life, the Istanbul authorities’ attempt to destroy this historic part of the city seems an echo of the Turkish government’s past attempts to expel Greek Christians from Turkey and to erase their culture by changing the names of streets and buildings.

The narrative moves between the present day, at the outset of the Covid pandemic, as Pericles and the remaining residents of The Circle attempt to resist the attempts of the developers, and his memories of past events, some very traumatic. I have to admit this aspect of Turkey’s history, the forced expulsion of Greeks, the confiscation of their property and the violence visited on the non-Muslim minority – Greeks, Armenian and Jews – was completely new to me. Pericles’ experience of feeling like an outcast in the city of his birth over the years is neatly mirrored in the present day by the quarantine restrictions that sees residents confined to the building.

Pericles is a complex character. Although he’s lived through and witnessed some terrible events, he’s not a saint. He falls in love impulsively and is deceitful. He is self-centered, often prioritising his own desires over the needs of others or his responsibilities. He owned a pharmacy but at one point also a share in a night club in the basement of The Circle run by a shady individual who dealt in drugs. Despite this, the author makes Pericles a very human figure, flawed but still possessing some good qualities.

An example of Pericles’ impulsive nature is when he sees a young woman called Leyla being shown around the vacant ground floor apartment. Instantly he becomes determined she must have the apartment, accepting a price below market value. Does she remind him of other women he has known or does he, even at seventy-five, feel a physical attraction towards her? Does he simply yearn for friendship with someone who possesses the energy of youth? Whatever, when Pericles learns Leyla is a writer he decides she is the perfect person to turn the notes he has been scribbling down about his life into a polished memoir. She teases out more detail, especially about his emotional response to the things he has witnessed. In fact, it’s unclear if what we’re reading is his original recollections or her embellished version. At one point, Pericles even comes up with the idea that Leyla should write his story as a novel, noting ‘we’d just need to change the names of the people and the streets’. But then he reflects, ‘who among those I’ve named in my story was still alive? Nobody.’

The Last Apartment in Istanbul is the well-crafted story of a man and of a city. The author describes in unsparing detail the brutal expulsions of the Greek community in the 1950s and 1960s, and the impact of the diaspora: families separated, often for years, unable – or unwilling – to return. My only reservation was the book’s ending seemed a little too neat but others may disagree.

I received a review copy courtesy of Head of Zeus via NetGalley.

In three words: Immersive, emotional, dramatic
Try something similar: The Silence of Scheherazade by Defne Suman

About the Author

Defne Suman was born in Istanbul and grew up on Buyukada Island. She gained a Masters in sociology from the Bosphorus University and then worked as a teacher in Thailand and Laos, where she studied Far Eastern philosophy and mystic disciplines. She later continued her studies in Oregon, USA and now lives in Athens with her husband. Her books include The Silence of Scheherazade and At The Breakfast Table. Her work is translated to many languages all around the world.

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