Plot twist: J.K. Rowling announces eighth Harry Potter book

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Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe are shown in a scene from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”. Photo: AP

Published: 9:30am, 11 Feb 2016Updated: 12:45pm, 13 Jun 2016

When die-hard “Harry Potter” fans first heard that J.K. Rowling was writing a sequel to her beloved seven-part series, they couldn’t wait to get their hands on the book. Then they realised the sequel wasn’t going to be a book at all, but a play.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is set to debut in London at the Palace Theatre on Harry’s birthday, July 30.

But on Wednesday, a surprise twist – Rowling announced that the script of the play has been turned into a two-part book, to be released at 12.01 a.m. on July 31.

“Pottermore is proud to be a key part of the multi-platform effort that will allow the epic eighth Harry Potter story to be read and enjoyed by a wider, global audience,” said Susan Jurevics, CEO of J.K. Rowling’s online home base Pottermore in an announcement on the site.

Author J.K. Rowling has kept the Harry Potter franchise rolling long after the supposed end of the literary series. Photo: AP

The play was not written by Rowling herself. English playwright Jack Thorne wrote the script based on “an original new story” Rowling wrote with Thorne and theatre director John Tiffany. It is set 19 years after the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the series’ seventh and supposedly final book.

Harry is “an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband, and father of three school-age children.”