General fiction

To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

323 pages · First published 1960

Scout Finch grows up in 1930s Maycomb, Alabama, observing a community whose polite surface conceals entrenched racial prejudice and rigid social divisions. Her father, attorney Atticus Finch, agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman, exposing the family to hostility. Scout and her brother Jem experience the trial alongside their fascination with reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, gradually discovering that courage and goodness rarely look as simple as childhood categories suggest. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is both a coming-of-age story and a critique of racial injustice, filtered through a child narrator whose limited understanding makes the adult world’s contradictions especially stark.