Harper Lee denies giving approval for new memoir

The reclusive author of To Kill a Mockingbird says she never gave her approval to a new memoir that portrays itself as a rare, intimate look into the lives of the writer and her older sister in small-town Alabama.

“Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my co-operation is a falsehood,” Harper Lee said in a letter, just as The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee was about to be released.

The book was written by Marja Mills, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, who moved next door to Lee and her sister, Alice, in 2004 and remained there for 18 months.