Books

OMG! A New Harry Potter Book Is Coming Soon

by Emma Oulton

If you didn’t manage to score tickets to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on the West End, you may not be totally missing out after all — because the news just broke of a Cursed Child book soon to be winging its way to our shelves. Overnight from July 30th to 31st, mere hours after the first lucky audiences have emerged from London’s Palace Theatre, a Harry Potter and the Cursed Child book will launch on Pottermore, as well as being simultaneously released by Scholastic. And then, probably, we’ll all crash the Internet from trying to download it too fast.

But is Cursed Child a new J.K. Rowling novel? Sadly, no — but it’s almost as good. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play written by Jack Thorne, but based on a story that he crafted together with our beloved J.K. The new Cursed Child book is a “special rehearsal edition” of the script; in other words, it might not be exactly the same as the play itself, but it’s close enough that we can re-enact it with the help of our siblings, best friends, and cats — and then pretty much feel like we saw the play.

So far, we know that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is about Harry’s middle son, Albus Severus. The story picks up directly where Deathly Hallows left off, meaning that those famous last words “All was well” aren’t so reassuring after all. The rest of the details are up in the air — until we can lay our hands on the script, that is.

And the excitement doesn’t stop there: the Cursed Child script book is just the first in a whole new publishing program being developed by J.K. Rowling’s literary agency The Blair Partnership. Once we’ve torn our way through The Cursed Child, there are plenty of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them books following shortly behind. Man, it’s a great time to be a Muggle.

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