If you're into Southern Gothic 'My Sunshine Away' by MO Walsh (Viking) R280An extraordinary debut in which our narrator, a 14-year-old boy, witnesses the rape of a young girl he has a crush on. The rapist is not caught and the boy sets out, in a long hot Louisiana summer, to find her attacker. But behind the picket fences of small-town USA there is much darkness. Pat Conroy fans will be blown away.The issueIt's odd but there's been no local hype about the publication next week of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, the "parent" of To Kill A Mockingbird, one of the most adored novels of all time. Although set 20 years after Mockingbird's events (nine-year-old narrator, Scout, observes the drama in fictional Maycomb, Alabama, as her lawyer father defends a black man falsely accused of rape), Watchman was actually written first. Lee's publishers suggested a bit of a rewrite, so she put it aside, to start on Mockingbird, which appeared to widespread acclaim in 1960. Like that other famous Southern writer Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind), Lee published only the one novel - until now.The Watchman manuscript was discovered (depending on who you believe, Lee's lawyer or the New York Times) in either 2011 or August last year. The book's publication was announced in February and, hailed as the literary sensation of the decade, advance orders have sent it soaring up Amazon's best-seller lists. Watchman, with many of the same characters as Mockingbird, has done wonders for the latter's sales. In the US, HarperCollins Publishers reportedly shipped 370000 hardcover and trade paperback copies of Mockingbird between February and May 30, compared with 59000 in the same period in 2014.Bookstore events around the release range from the sublime to the ridiculous. In New York, excerpts will be read by Mary Badham, who played Scout alongside Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. In Corbridge, Northumberland, Anne Jones, a world champion speed reader, will attempt to read the book in under 30 minutes before a live audience.Some stores are throwing midnight cocktail parties. Tequila mockingbird, anyone?Crash courseReading a recent review of Richard Stephens's Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad (John Murray), I discovered that in the UK the use of the F-word increases by 300% from the lower-middle to the upper-middle classes. It's the better education, see? More fluent speakers are more fluent swearers. Swearing apparently also boosts pain tolerance. Feel free to test this among yourselves by dropping a hammer on your toes.The bottom line"Death to the girl of the nervous fidgets, behold the woman with a beer in her hand and one endless cigarette." - Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola (Grand Central Publishing)..