J. K. Rowling and the Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults will be called The Casual Vacancy and will be released by Little, Brown, and Company on September 27, 2012. It can be pre-ordered as an ebook or hardcover.

This is quite a week for Rowling because her website Pottermore is also finally open to the public, along with her Pottermore Shop for ebooks and audio books.

The author had been saying for several years that she was working something quite different for adults, and a fellow Edinburgh writer, Ian Rankin had hinted that the book might be a mystery set in Edinburgh. But it appears that Rowling has not written an urban mystery, but something more conventionally British - think Agatha Christie - and set in a small country village.
From the blurb on Amazon:

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town’s council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations? Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.

I was instantly reminded of the book Paradise, Postponed by John Mortimer, which also included local political intrigue around the character of the unforgettable Leslie Titmuss ("through the chair").

On my Harry Potter blog The Illuminated Dungeon I wrote that the choice of the name "Pagford" was possibly a corruption of "Pigford" and another Rowlingesque boar-related name like Hogwarts or Hogsmeade. But then a friend on Facebook pointed out to me that in the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane novel Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers, the house where the Wimsey's are living is in Paggleham, and the story goes that Harriet Vane grew up in the nearby town of Great Pagford. The "borrowing" so to speak of the place name is not too surprising because on Rowling's official site for years she had a picture of a bookshelf with several Sayers novels. She also has a character called "Romilda Vane" who has a bad crush on Harry in Half-Blood Prince. For that matter, you can make the case that the last name of Harry Potter's mother - Evans - is an anagram for Vane. And Agatha Christie wrote a novel called Why Didn't They Ask Evans, and that takes me back to the fact that JKR is on familiar territory in the British novel pantheon and I suspect her offering will be just as witty and insightful as the many writers of that pastoral genre who have come before her.