Harper Lee's 'Go Set a Watchman' steady atop U.S. bestsellers list

Harper Lee's highly anticipated novel "Go Set a Watchman" once again topped the U.S. fiction bestsellers list on Thursday for a third consecutive week.

The novel introduces six year-old tomboy Scout from "Mockingbird" some 20 years after the events of the first novel. Now called Jean Louise Finch, she travels from New York back to her Alabama home town to visit her father and to consider a marriage proposal from a childhood friend.

The chapter also reveals that Scout's older brother Jem, died some years ago, and that Atticus, now 72 years old, has crippling arthritis and has handed over much of his legal business to his unconventional daughter's suitor.

"Go Set a Watchman" was written in the 1950s before Lee, now 89 and in an assisted-living facility in her home state of Alabama, penned her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece.

She then largely retired from public life. Publishing house Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, astonished the literary world in February when it announced it would publish a book that only a few people knew existed.

Harper has ordered an initial U.S. print run of 2 million for "Go Set a Watchman" and the book is already the most pre-ordered book on Amazon.com since J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in 2007 - the seventh and final novel about the British boy wizard.