Harper Lee · 1960 · coming-of-age

Harper Lee's 1960 novel, set in the Alabama town she grew up in. Scout Finch is six when it starts, and the book is three summers in a place where everybody's business is known - a man in a house nobody has seen out of, and a trial that the town has decided the verdict of before it opens.

1. 1
   Maycomb

   A tired old town built on Monroeville, where Lee's father was a lawyer and Truman Capote spent his summers next door - and where in 1933 there was nothing to buy and no money to buy it with.

2. 2
   The Radley place

   Three doors down, with the shutters closed since before Scout was born, and a boy who was shut in it thirty years ago for falling in with the wrong crowd - and who leaves gum and soap dolls in a knothole.

3. 3
   The courthouse

   Tom Robinson's trial, watched from the coloured balcony because there is nowhere else for the Finch children to sit - and a defence that proves the thing conclusively and loses anyway to a jury that takes hours.

4. 4
   First Purchase church

   Calpurnia takes them to her own church, where there are no hymn books and the lines are called out - the one chapter in which the children are the ones who do not belong, and are told so politely at the door.

5. 5
   The Ewell place

   Behind the town dump, and the reason the whole thing happens - and the place Bob Ewell comes out of on Hallowe'en night with a kitchen knife, having decided that winning the case was not enough.

6. 6
   The road home

   Scout in a ham costume that saves her life, a scuffle in the dark under the oaks, and a man carrying Jem home - and afterwards she walks him to his door and stands on the porch and sees the street from there.