JK Rowling’s screenwriting debut Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has shot to the top of book charts hours after its publication was announced.
Out on 19 November, the book is Rowling’s script for the film of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which will be released by Warner Bros a day earlier. The story was inspired by the textbook of the same name, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which is used by students at Rowling’s magical school of Hogwarts and written by “the wizarding world’s preeminent magizoologist”, Newt Scamander. In 2001, Rowling published a version of this textbook – complete with scribbled margin notes by Harry Potter – with 80% of proceeds from the book’s sales going to UK charity Comic Relief.
The film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is set in 1926, as Scamander arrives in New York after a trip to find magical creatures from around the world. “He might have come and gone without incident … were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical briefcase, and the escape of some of Newt’s fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds,” said Rowling’s digital publisher Pottermore, announcing the November release of the script, which it called “a feat of imagination and an exciting adventure”.
The print editions of the book will be published by Little, Brown in the UK, and by Scholastic in the US and Canada, while the ebook will be published by Pottermore. The script is already topping Waterstones’ online bestseller chart, just ahead of Rowling’s script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is out in July. Her crime novel, Career of Evil, written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, is in fifth place in the Waterstones chart.
