Legendary Alabama author Harper Lee has a new book, publishing 9 years after her death

Harper Lee, who was famous until the year before her death for having published only one novel – albeit a novel that became one of the most influential books in history – has another book being published in October 2025, nine years after her death.

The book, “The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays,” contains “several unseen short stories from the early creative years of the legendary author,” publisher HarperCollins announced March 4.

Barnes & Noble said in a statement also released March 4, 2025, that the book will be sold exclusively at its stores. You can preorder the book here for delivery in October. It will cost $30 in hardcover but Barnes and Noble says no cover design has been released yet.

Lee, a native of Monroeville, Ala., won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1960 novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and didn’t publish again until age 88 in 2015, when a second novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” was published. That book was from an early manuscript for “Mockingbird,” seen from the eyes of an adult protagonist rather than the precocious six-year-old Scout from the 1960 book.

HarperCollins said “The Land of Sweet Forever” contains eight short stories that were written by a Harper Lee, who was born Nelle Harper Lee in 1926, at a time when she was submitting articles to magazines and other publications.

The typewritten manuscripts, written before the author began “Mockingbird,” were discovered after Lee’s death, the publisher’s press release said. Lee’s estate executor, Tonja Carter of Monroeville, brokered the deal with HarperCollins, along with Michael Dean of Andrew Nurnberg Associates, the UK-based representatives of Lee’s estate.

“In 2024, the Estate made the decision to publish the stories alongside eight nonfiction pieces by Lee, which appeared in a range of publications between 1961 and 2006, collected together for the first time and now brought back into the public eye,” the HarperCollins press release said.

The book includes an introduction by Casey Cep, author of “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.”

Tonja Carter, left, was a friend and attorney for Harper Lee and oversees her estate. She poses with Joy Brown and Lee’s plaque for the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame at Judson College.

The essays in the book are described by Barnes & Noble as “newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces, offering a fresh perspective on the remarkable literary mind of Harper Lee” who was less remembered as “the dogged young writer, who crafted stories in hopes of magazine publication; Lee the lively New Yorker, Alabamian, and friend to Truman Capote; and the Lee who peppered the pages of McCall’s and Vogue with thoughtful essays in the latter part of the twentieth century.”

The stories include fiction and nonfiction essays “covering territory from the Alabama schoolyards of Lee’s youth to the luncheonettes and movie houses of midcentury Manhattan,” that invite “still-vital conversations about politics, equality, travel, love, fiction, art, the American South, and what it means to lead an engaged and creative life.”