Rowling for grown-ups storms to top of charts

Bookshops opened early and some grown-up Harry Potter fans lined up overnight as JK Rowling launched her long-anticipated first book for adults, The Casual Vacancy.

The lines were shorter and the wizard costumes missing, but the book was published to some of the same fanfare that greeted each Potter tome, with stores wheeling out crates of the books precisely at 8am, as part of a finely honed marketing strategy.

Published five years after the release of the last book in the boy wizard saga, The Casual Vacancy is already No 1 on Amazon’s US chart, and bookmaker William Hill put 2/1 odds on it outselling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which shifted 2.6m copies in Britain on its first day.