Evertree Crescent was a sickle moon of 1930s bungalows, which lay two minutes from Pagford’s main square. In number thirty-six, a house tenanted longer than any other in the street, Shirley Mollison sat, propped up against her pillows, sipping the tea that her husband had brought her. The reflection facing her in the mirrored doors of the built-in wardrobe had a misty quality, due partly to the fact that she was not wearing glasses, and partly to the soft glow cast over the room by her rose-patterned curtains. In this flattering, hazy light, the dimpled pink and white face beneath the short silver hair was cherubic.
The bedroom was just large enough to accommodate Shirley’s single bed and Howard’s double, crammed together, non-identical twins. Howard’s mattress, which still bore his prodigious imprint, was empty. The soft purr and hiss of the shower was audible from where Shirley and her rosy reflection sat facing each other, savouring the news that seemed still to effervesce in the atmosphere, like bubbling champagne.
Barry Fairbrother was dead. Snuffed out. Cut down. No event of national importance, no war, no stock-market collapse, no terrorist attack, could have sparked in Shirley the awe, the avid interest and feverish speculation that currently consumed her.
J.K. Rowling The Casual Vacancy (2012) 
After a decade or so dealing primarily with the enchanted world of Harry Potter, JK Rowling has tried her hand at something closer to home, a state-of-England novel vaguely resemblant of Margaret Drabble’s works – incorporating crime and mystery and dealing with a group of people whose lives are supposed to epitomise the state of affairs in most English households. While Harry Potter series definitely is not a clichéd children’s book where the good always wins, but a story filled with violent, unpredictable, and unfair death and failure, The Casual Vacancy seems to be the cauldron in which Rowling has tried to pour all the gloomy deprivation of the real life as well as her almost palpable desire to target a primarily adult audience. The result, lamentably, is quite depressingly clichéd and quite banal.
questionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years’ says the renowned Neil Gaiman about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, however, one cannot help but wonder which books Mr Gaiman actually placed into the category of the ‘fantastic’ so that they ended up overtaken by Clarke’s gargantuan novel. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell definitely has its merits, particularly with regards to the style and the in-depth re-imagination of a magical English past, but one must not turn a blind eye to some of its definite shortcomings.
