'The idea that other people might have had such a different life experience that their choices and beliefs and behaviours would be completely different … seems to escape a lot of otherwise intelligent people. 'So many people, certainly people who sit around the cabinet table, say: 'Well, it worked for me' or 'This is how my father managed it',' Rowling said. The election ultimately turns on the fate of Pagford's grotty council estate, the Fields, embodied in The Casual Vacancy by the wretched, wrung-out Weedon family: mother Terri, struggling to kick her drug addiction, three-year-old son Robbie, under threat of social care, and teenage daughter Krystal. Set in the fictional West Country village of Pagford, which bears a passing resemblance to Rowling's own childhood home in the Forest of Dean, and telling the story of a parish election triggered by the death of councillor Barry Fairbrother, The Casual Vacancy investigates the agendas and infighting that fuel local politics, and the class divisions that rive even the most picturesque English communities. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this.' It's a rush of adrenaline, it's chemical. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. 'I thought: local election! And I just knew. The idea for the novel, her first since the 2007 publication of the final volume in the Harry Potter series that made her a global household name and the world's first author to become a billionaire solely through her writing, came to her on an aeroplane. Even a tenner a week can make such a vast, vast difference.' 'But it's not a 'little bit' when you're in that situation. 'It feels to me a lot like it did in the early 90s, where there's been a bit of redistribution of benefits and suddenly lone-parent families are that little bit worse off,' she said. Speaking to the Guardian's Decca Aikenhead, she described what she saw as 'a horribly familiar change of atmosphere' since the 2010 election.

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