Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay - J.K. Rowling

For fans of Harry Potter, a new magical realm is about to be unveiled.

Rowling has already given a sneak peek into the new home of magic she is about to uncover with four original stories on the Pottermore website, collected together in a series intriguingly entitled: ‘History of Magic in North America’. Here Rowling explodes what we know about the legacy of the United States from the Founding Fathers to the Roaring Twenties and creates an entirely new canon, a past steeped in magic, cloaked in suspicion. Rowling’s account takes readers from the earliest Fourteenth-Century non-magic settlers, fearful in the face of Native American magicians, to the enactment of Rappaport’s Law – a law segregating Muggles from the magical community.

Speed forward to 1920’s New York and we have the backdrop for Rowling’s full-length screenplay for a breath-taking new film; a dazzling world of smoke-filled jazz clubs, swing dance, champagne, glamour and bright-lights. Into this golden new world comes Newt Scamander, a British wizard expelled from Hogwarts, Newt is in exile, alone with a suitcase that holds a secret.

For Newt carries a precious cargo of magical creatures. Or at least he did… Some of the creatures have escaped and this puts him in terrible, mortal danger. The wizarding world of New York is not like the one he knows. The New Salem Philanthropic Society, a fanatical No-Maj (Muggle) extremist organisation, is determined to wipe out wizarding kind. Newt finds himself on the run and he must find the lost creatures before the authorities catch up with him and before the latent tensions between magical people and those who live in fear of it, escalates into full-scale war.

The design duo behind the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts films, Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima - aka MinaLima - have lent their creative flair to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay and The Case of Beasts: Explore the Film Wizardry of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Before Harry Potter, there was another. Before Harry Potter there was Newt Scamander…