J.K. Rowling announced Tuesday that she has written a children’s fairy tale called “The Ickabog” and will release chapters of the book online each weekday for children to enjoy during these “strange, unsettling times.” The author dropped the first two chapters of the story on Tuesday afternoon.
Rowling broke the news on Twitter, telling fans the book is not a spin-off of her best-selling “Harry Potter” series, but a brand new story. Rowling said in a press release on her website that she wrote “most of a first draft” more than 10 years ago, while she was still writing the “Harry Potter” books.
“I always meant to publish it, but after the last Potter was released I wrote two novels for adults and, after some dithering, decided to put those out next,” Rowling tweeted, adding, “until very recently, the only people who’d heard the story of The Ickabog were my two younger children.”