NEW YORK, July 21 — Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman sold more than 1.1 million copies in North America in its first week on sale and now has more than 3.3 million copies in print, the publisher, HarperCollins, said yesterday.

“First-week sales of Go Set a Watchman have far exceeded our expectations,” Brian Murray, president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers, said in a statement.

“We are thrilled to see readers responding to this historic new work from an iconic author like Harper Lee.”

Despite the controversies clouding the book’s release, and mixed reviews, readers flocked to bookstores to buy Watchman, which arrived 55 years after Lee’s debut novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

HarperCollins has done multiple printings of the book.

At Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million, Watchman set first-day sales records for adult fiction.

Barnes & Noble said it expected Watchman to be its best-selling title of the year.

The book was the most preordered book at Barnes & Noble since the 2009 publication of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, said Mary Amicucci, vice president of adult trade and children’s books for Barnes & Noble.

“We’re seeing demand across the country for this book,” Amicucci said.

“None of us ever expected in our lifetime to have a second book by Harper Lee.”

While Watchman has become an instant commercial success, it has fared less well with reviewers, who inevitably compared it to Mockingbird, Lee’s beloved 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Book critics and lay readers were divided over the novel’s quality, and many were shocked to learn that Atticus Finch, the moral center of Mockingbird, is depicted as an aging, arthritic racist in Watchman.

On Amazon and Goodreads, some readers embraced Watchman as a worthy addition to Lee’s legacy, while others declared it a mess that lacked the coherence and polished prose of Mockingbird.

“This book is difficult to review because it was never meant to be published,” one reader posted on Amazon in a one-star review, calling it “more of a historical document than a novel”. — New York Times