To Kill a Mockingbird is undoubtedly a landmark novel in terms of the documentation of the injustices of black civil rights in 1930s America and has perhaps not surprisingly made it onto nearly every 'top 100 novels' list known to man. It is because of this reputation that I first picked it up and began reading.

The novel, told through the eyes of a young girl, centres around a lawyer who is asked to defend a black man wrongly accused of the rape of a white woman in Alabama and the opposition he faces throughout the trial and indeed after.

Whilst the books main event focuses on the unjust treatment of African Americans in the Deep South during the years of the Depression, I don't think it would be entirely accurate to label this as a civil rights novel - its scope is much broader: it touches on the different roles of men and women; it deals to a greater extent on the relationship between the middle and lower class; it explores how we view morality in a much more general sense than just in terms of race. The novel captures brilliantly the general attitudes and behaviours of southern people at this bleak time in American history and for this reason alone it is worth reading. And I urge every reader who comes to read this book, PLEASE, do not read this purely as a novel about civil rights - the trial doesn't even get underway until halfway through and is over in the blink of an eye. Take time to enjoy all the other themes!

But of course, despite all its other wonderful details and observations of life in general, the novel does indeed serves as a grim reminder of how we were and of the injustice which we should never see repeated...