Mockingbird sequel raises eyebrows, and Harper Lee's not talking

For a writer who made her name evoking the brittle frailties of the small southern town of her youth, there's a symmetry to Harper Lee's life today. She spends her days in a modest assisted-living home barely a kilometre away from the courthouse where as a child she used to sit watching her father argue before a jury.

During a time in which her name has yet again been emblazoned in headlines, throwing her private life into the global spotlight once more, it is bewildering just how tiny Lee's world has become. Monroeville, Alabama, the community she fictionalised as Maycomb, has closed ranks around her as though reclaiming its most famous citizen.

In the office of the director of the home, there's a file dedicated to the 88-year-old that looks uncannily like the spine of yet another volume by the famously one-book novelist. Nelle Harper Lee, it says in bold type. There's no possibility of talking to her about the astounding news, that 55 years after her first rendition of Maycomb a second work, , will appear in July. She is not seated among the residents in the communal area of the home, and the rooms leading off it all have their doors shut.

The director explains politely that Lee won't be meeting me today. She takes my card and says: "I can ask her attorney. If she approves, we can see."

Which attorney, I ask. "Tonja Carter, here in town."