Harry Potter casts spell again!

LONDON: "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child", the script for a new London play telling the eighth story in the hugely popular boy-wizard series, has sold more than 680,000 print copies in the UK in three days, publisher Little, Brown Book Group said on Wednesday.

The book - a script and not a narrative novel like author J K Rowling’s previous Potter books - was published at midnight on Sunday, shortly after the play’s gala opening.

It is set 19 years after "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", which was released in 2007 and the final book in the original series.

UK book industry magazine and website The Bookseller said if the sales rate continued, the script book would "be the second biggest-selling single week for one title since records began, with ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as the first".

That book sold 1.8 million copies and 780,000 units of the adult edition in the UK in its launch week, it added.

Bringing back Rowling’s enchanted world of witches and wizards, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" features the lead character as a father of three and an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic.

"After just two days’ sales it is already our biggest-selling hardback since Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ in 2009," Kate Skipper, buying director at UK bookstore chain Waterstones, said in a statement.