The Casual Vacancy. By J.K.Rowling. Little, Brown; 503 pages; $35 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

READERS are conservative creatures. They do not really like authors to change genres, and the more successful the writer the less they like it. Roald Dahl’s adult fiction is ignored and Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories are all but unknown, although they are wonderful.

By such a measure, J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter children’s series has sold more than 450m copies in 73 languages, should find it easier to beat Usain Bolt at the 100 metres than to make it writing fiction for grown-ups. But that has not put her off.

Her first adult novel, “The Casual Vacancy”, is the story of eight families from two English villages that physically lap each other, but are divided in every other way—by social class, education, money, aspiration and shoe fashions.

The book opens with the death that creates a vacancy on the parish council and unsettles the notionally comfortable, revealing depths of loneliness and spite. By the end, when redemption (of sorts) comes only at the price of two further deaths, the reader has been treated to parents who war with children, teachers with pupils, wives with husbands, and old-timers with incomers. It is not just the men who are abusive: middle-class mothers swill wine while single mums across the divide take heroin.

The most memorable scenes draw on Ms Rowling’s considerable imagination: a young teenager caring for her neglected three-year-old brother while their mother (hardly more than a child herself) longs only for the return of her pimp and dealer; two boys sitting in class behind an Asian girl with a long plait and the shadow of down on her upper lip, while they quietly chant: “The hairy man-woman. The bearded dumb-bell…”

Writing has made Ms Rowling rich, and her riches have made her the subject of great envy. This is a novel of insight and skill, deftly drawn and, at the end, cleverly pulled together. It plays to her strengths as a storyteller. That will not stop the envious from carping.