The Casual Vacancy

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By J. K. Rowling

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Price

$19.99

Price

$25.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 23, 2013. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

A big novel about a small town…

When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the 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 parish 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?

A big novel about a small town, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults. It is the work of a storyteller like no other.

Genre:

  • Praise for The Casual Vacancy:
  • "I had come under the spell of a great novel....A big, ambitious, brilliant, profane, funny, deeply upsetting and magnificently eloquent novel of contemporary England, rich with literary intelligence....This is a deeply moving book by somebody who understands both human beings and novels very, very deeply."
    Lev Grossman, Time
  • "A vivid read with great, memorable characters and a truly emotional payoff....Rowling captures the humanity in everyone."
    People
  • "This book represents a truckload of shrewdness....There were sentences I underlined for the sheer purpose of figuring out how English words could be combined so delightfully....genuinely moving."
    Washington Post
  • "A positively propulsive read."
    Wall Street Journal
  • "Often entertaining....Rowling does a nice job laying out her 20-plus characters' endless pretensions and weaknesses, which she punctures with gleeful flicks of a surprisingly sharp comic blade."
    Entertainment Weekly
  • "The Casual Vacancy is a complete joy to read....a stunning, brilliant, outrageously gripping and entertaining evocation of British society today."
    The Mirror (UK)
  • "A study of provincial life, with a large cast and multiple, interlocking plots, drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot...The Casual Vacancy immerses the reader in a richly peopled, densely imagined world...intelligent, workmanlike, and often funny."
    The Guardian (UK)

On Sale
Jul 23, 2013
Page Count
512 pages
Publisher
Back Bay Books
ISBN-13
9780316228589

J. K. Rowling

About the Author

J.K. Rowling is the author of the bestselling Harry Potter series and The Casual Vacancy, a novel for adults. Under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, she is the author of the Cormoran Strike crime series, including The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm. As well as an Order of the British Empire for services to children’s literature, she is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees. She lives in Edinburgh.

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