'Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.' This book presents a lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl.

Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with both compassion and humour.

She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, Atticus, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy.