Here’s why JK Rowling’s new book ‘The Ickabog’ is being published online for free

Harry Potter author JK Rowling is publishing a new book called The Ickabog online for free. She is releasing it chapter by chapter to keep children and their families entertained at a time when they are stuck at home due to the novel coronavirus.

Taking to Twitter, the author announced on May 26 that The Ickabog was penned about a decade ago, but was lying forgotten in her attic. She had written the fairytale involving kings and child-eating monsters to read to her children as a bedtime story.

Rowling had thought of the new book’s storyline while she was writing Harry Potter and had plans to release it right after publishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – the last book of the Potter series that won her international acclaim.

The manuscript was almost forgotten as Rowling had got busy writing for adults. Only recently she thought of “immersing herself in a fictional world” again and began reading out chapters from the book to her family.
Finding her children — who are teenagers now — to be “touchingly enthusiastic” about the story, she went ahead and retrieved the story and published it for free.

Rowling wrote on Twitter: “I’ve decided to publish The Ickabog for free online, so children on lockdown, or even those back at school during these strange, unsettling times, can read it or have it read to them.”