Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. AP
LONDON—“Harry Potter” author J. K. Rowling spent the day avoiding newspapers as her first novel for grownups hit the bookshops Thursday.
But “the book is what I wanted it to be,” she told about 900 fans at London’s Southbank Centre on the day “The Casual Vacancy,” a black comedy of village life, was published. It had sold one million advance copies.
Kept closely under wraps until publication day, the book is a gritty tale involving sex and drug addiction that is widely expected to be Britain’s best-selling fiction title this year. It is already topping the Amazon charts.
Five years
Set in the fictional village of Pagford in southwest England, it is about the fight to fill a slot on the parish council after the incumbent’s sudden death, and hinges on the fate of a squalid housing estate.
It took Rowling, 47, five years to complete and required another half-written children’s novel to be put on the back burner, she told fans but also said writing it was “a lovely place to be.” She added, “There was so much pressure for the Potter books. I kept telling myself, ‘You don’t have to publish this.’”
The book has met with a mixed reception from critics. Some said it was dull in parts and that Rowling’s most vivid writing was on the familiar ground of children pitted against the power of adults.
Rowling revealed that she would change “quite a few things” about the Harry Potter books if she could, and that the actors who played Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione in the blockbuster films were “all too good-looking.” AFP