The Casual Vacancy

by J K Rowling

J K Rowling's first novel after Harry Potter, for adults, is a delightful lesson in strong storytelling. Having cut her teeth in the episodic, tense battles of good and evil (the Harry Potter comparisons, inevitable, are hard to shake off), she brings us to Pagford, a sleepy village in West Country, where the local councillor, by way of death, is casually vacant, leaving open a seat that needs filling. This sets into motion some increasingly aggressive lobbying by the two extremes of the village, the well-to-do and them off that council estate. It's a masterful dissection of a class war.

It's also a clinical cross-section of modern-day Britain. Rowling exposes small town prejudices, drug addiction, bullying, the future of Britain's youth and the ways of its 'old guard'.

She returns to themes she explored in the Potter series, themes such as unrequited love, familial loyalty and protection, the old vs new, the right vs wrong, and she does this with confidence. To hear that she was nervous about writing a book for adults is surprising; there's no nerves here. Only the village of Pagford in all its petty, bigoted, unruly and ultimately endearing glory.

Publisher: Little, Brown

J K Rowling

J K Rowling has written fiction since she was a child, and she always wanted to be an author. Her parents loved reading and their house in Chepstow was full of books. In fact, J K Rowling wrote her first ‘book’ at the age of six – a story about a rabbit called Rabbit. She studied French and Classics at Exeter University, then moved to Edinburgh – via London and Portugal. In 2000 she was awarded an OBE for services to children’s literature.

The idea for Harry Potter occurred to her on the train from Manchester to London, where she says Harry Potter ‘just strolled into my head fully formed’, and by the time she had arrived at King’s Cross, many of the characters had taken shape. During the next five years she outlined the plots for each book and began writing the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which was first published in 1997.

http://www.jkrowling.com/

Credit J P Masclet