In September, apparently. 'The Casual Vacancy':

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17693206

update: not a review, put this in the wrong place, sorry.

Dreadful title.

Hmm, yes, weird title!

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"I suppose it's a question of deciding which one comes out first."

Heh. So different from the likes of us. No-one's going to reject JKR's next novel, are they!

Just bizarre. As someone said elsewhere online, can you imagine a new writer getting anywhere with a concept like that?

I wonder whether, in this case, "adult" refers to the plot or the standard of writing.

If her Adult baby is a bullshit then who's gonna praise it.

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Rowling, I think you're living a delusional life, you think 'Harry Potter and Hogwarts somewhere exist."

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Or maybe you're thinking 'The casual Vacancy' would be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

I'm going to read it. I think she's fab and I'm already sick of all the snidey comments about her.

JKR rocks.

I'm going to read it too Caroline, glad I'm not alone ;o)

Oh, I think she's fab too. I also feel very sorry for her - she didn't ask to have her books turned into an insane world-wide phenomenon, and it must be incredibly difficult to deal with as a writer. I would like success, but not that kind of success.

I also feel very sorry for her

Usually, with celebrities, I would sympathise with that. In JKR's case, though, I feel less inclined to do so. Whilst she couldn't have anticipated the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter stories, she hasn't been shy about milking it, or about helping to build the phenomenon. Furthermore, whilst the books are certainly okay for the age group they're intended for, the one I read (Half Blood Prince) was not particularly well-written in a technical sense. There were a lot of random paragraph breaks, plus plenty of passages that had the rawness of a hastily-written first draft which she'd never gotten around to revising and polishing. That was the basis for my comment about the term "adult novel".

In fact, I think a lot of her kudos with some people - women in particular - comes from her "single mum made good" background, rather than the quality of her writing.

But she's a children's writer! It's not her fault that adults decided to read the books.

As for milking it - I'm not sure what you mean. She was she supposed to tell Bloomsbury to stop printing after the first 10,000, 000 copies? Or retract the film rights when she felt she'd made enough money? Unfortunately the industry doesn't work like that.

I have absolutely no opinion about her personal life, either prior to writing the books or post. What I think is admirable is the number of kids she's turned onto reading, the what she's done for the book industry as a whole and children's literature in particular.

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well - I suppose she WAS a children's writer. Now she's an adult writer too! But I'd hope people would read the new book before they cast the first stone.

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"the what she's done"???

That was meant to be "and what" - not sure what happened there! I'd like to blame autocorrect but I'm on my laptop so any mistakes are purely mine

what she's done for the book industry as a whole

Such as give everyone the impression that her success is typical? I'm sure we're all aware of how many non-writers think that's exactly how it goes for most writers.

I think her success was one of those flukes which no one - no marketing expert, no editor, and certainly no writer - can predict, devise a means of repeating or completely explain. It started off in a low-key manner and snowballed. Lots of marketing people would love to be able to pull that kind of thing off on demand, but no one has managed it except by a similar fluke (e.g. that crazy frog thing that went around a few years ago).

As for being a children's writer, so are lots of others who manage to do it at the same time as producing technically good writing. One could argue, in fact, that it's all the more important to focus on writing technique for children, if part of the aim is to encourage them to try to emulate that.

I'll be interested to see what happens when children who are fans of Harry Potter ask their parents for a copy of this new book by the same author. It might have been a better idea, for that reason, for her to employ a pseudonym for the new book.

I don't think non-writers' myths and preconceptions about the book industry have anything to do with this.

When I said "what she did for the book industry" I was talking about something rather more concrete: the sales she generated, the excitement in the trade, the massive good she did bricks and mortar bookshops, the fabulous profits she generated for the independent publisher Bloomsbury (good for them).

Excitement like that is good for the trade as a whole - anything that gets books into the front pages of newspapers, generates theatre and buzz and a sense of the literary world as being an exciting, magical place where anything is possible - all that is a wonderful thing no matter which corner of the trade you work in.

You can produce "technically good writing" until the cows come home but it's not the be-all and end-all. I'm not even sure what "technically good writing" is. Is there an agreed rule on breaking a paragraph? If we all wrote to the same rule book, the world would be a fairly boring place.

the massive good she did bricks and mortar bookshops

Two of my friends run an independent bookshop. They made losses on most of the Harry Potter books. They even had to buy their stock off Amazon because Amazon were selling them to the public at less than the wholesale rate my friends were offered by the distributors. They had to put on midnight Harry Potter events, just to get kids to buy their copies in the shop - great fun at one level, but no profit in it; just the hope of holding on to some customers who may buy less heavily discounted books in future.

On another thread, I agreed with you about the snottiness often shown to commercial writers by those who believe they don't write well, technically. As I said there, I've learned more craft from commercial writers than anyone else.

However, I do have a concern at the notion of Harry Potter being good for turning a lot of kids on to reading. The question being, reading what exactly? The problem for me with Rowling's writing is that it doesn't leave the imagination of the reader much to do. Everything is spelled (pardon me) out - every facial expression is given, every thought, every reaction; dialogue tags everywhere. There aren't even any moral issues to mull over as you're reading: Harry, Good; Voldermort, Bad - just because the author says so. It's pre-digested, predictable, safe, baggy-plotted escapism. And yes, there's nothing wrong with a bit of that; it's just that so many teachers, reviewers, parents, etc, seem to want to hold her books up as great writing, too.

And by 'great writing', I don't think the argument necessarily has to swing back to literary fiction. There is a lot of great writing in children's literature - great in the sense that it actually stokes the imagination instead of smothering it. YA fiction in the 70s/80s had a huge influence on my own writing. Authors like M. E. Kerr, Katherine Patterson and E. L. Konigsberg wrote short books with lots of (well-crafted) spaces left between actions, dialogue and events - so the reader had somewhere to join in, rather than just sit at the side of the pitch and have the author tell them everything that's happening through a megaphone and stack of Marshall amps.

Terry

What I think is admirable is the number of kids she's turned onto reading, the what she's done for the book industry as a whole and children's literature in particular.

Hear, hear. And she has made being a children's author more 'acceptable' than it ever was before her success.

AND she is a very generous charity donor.

'Milking it'? Why should she not enjoy her enormous achievements?

However, I do have a concern at the notion of Harry Potter being good for turning a lot of kids on to reading. The question being, reading what exactly? The problem for me with Rowling's writing is that it doesn't leave the imagination of the reader much to do. Everything is spelled (pardon me) out - every facial expression is given, every thought, every reaction; dialogue tags everywhere. There aren't even any moral issues to mull over as you're reading: Harry, Good; Voldermort, Bad - just because the author says so. It's pre-digested, predictable, safe, baggy-plotted escapism. And yes, there's nothing wrong with a bit of that; it's just that so many teachers, reviewers, parents, etc, seem to want to hold her books up as great writing, too. And by 'great writing', I don't think the argument necessarily has to swing back to literary fiction. There is a lot of great writing in children's literature - great in the sense that it actually stokes the imagination instead of smothering it. YA fiction in the 70s/80s had a huge influence on my own writing. Authors like M. E. Kerr, Katherine Patterson and E. L. Konigsberg wrote short books with lots of (well-crafted) spaces left between actions, dialogue and events - so the reader had somewhere to join in, rather than just sit at the side of the pitch and have the author tell them everything that's happening through a megaphone and stack of Marshall amps.

Yes.

Though I do agree that we should give her adult book a chance before deciding it's going to be awful.