The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling, 2012
Mystery, thriller & crime Contemporary fictionGraphic novels & humour
A small English town turns on itself after a parish councillor dies, and Rowling gives the gossip, grudges and teenagers their full, uncomfortable due.
Feels like unease, grief and wonder. About time, love and adventure.
A page from the book
The night sky is a record of deaths we can still see.
But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know that they all were? J.K. Rowling.Rowling wrote The Casual Vacancy after Harry Potter; it was her first novel for adults, published in 2012, and was adapted into a BBC series in 2015.
Books that feel like this
More by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J. K. Rowling, 1997
A boy who has never been loved learns he is a wizard, enters a castle school of moving staircases, and finds the first friends who choose him.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
J. K. Rowling, 1998
A second year at Hogwarts turns sinister when a hidden chamber opens, a voice hisses in the walls, and everyone suspects Harry—while a vain new professor steals the credit.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
J. K. Rowling, 1999
A prison break, soul-draining guards, and a map that insults its readers: Harry's third year at Hogwarts.
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- What is The Casual Vacancy like?
- Feels like unease, grief and wonder. About time, love and adventure.
- What should I read after The Casual Vacancy?
- If you liked The Casual Vacancy, try The Woman in Cabin 10 (Ruth Ware), Happy Place (Emily Henry) and This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar).
A taste of the feed
The moment you decide you refuse to let fear choose who you become.
Was this what it was going to be like? Was I turning into someone who had panic attacks about walking home from the tube or staying the night alone in the house without their boyfriend? No, fuck that. I would not be that person.
The Woman in Cabin 10 · Ruth Ware
How a friendship quietly becomes the person you can't unlove.
He’s become my best friend the way the others did. Bit by bit, sand passing through an hour glass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly, more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back.
Happy Place · Emily Henry
What do you bring someone who has all of time?
I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
This Is How You Lose the Time War · Amal El-Mohtar
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed