Illustration by Sam Kerr for TIME
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The Casual Vacancy is not so much an extension of the Harry Potter books as their negative image. It's a painfully arbitrary and fallen world that, bereft of the magic that animates and ennobles Hogwarts, sags and cracks under its own weight. After his furtive coupling with Krystal, a melancholy, postcoital Fats thinks, "He wished he could simply be transported, this instant, to his attic bedroom." Harry would just have apparated there. But Fats, like the rest of us, must take the long way home.
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