Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

The quest for the lost phoenix ends

The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.

The only person left outside was a teenage boy who was lying flat on his back in a flowerbed outside number four.

And that is how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix starts. We had to wait until 21st June to find out what came next. The book has over a quarter of a million words: 255,000 in total and that's 64,000 words longer than fourth book Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire.

Thirteen million English language copies were printed for the launch on 21st June. Some bookshops stayed open the previous evening so that young Muggles could buy their copy at midnight. JK Rowling was at the launch inEdinburgh. Amazon.com had taken well over a million orders over the internet. Postmen's bones were sagging under the weight of all the books they had to carry.

In the book, Rowling writes: "Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. ‘It is time,’ he said, ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.”’

About 200 million Harry Potter books had been sold before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was launched. With the new book the total will rise to about 250 million.

Every day during 2002 thousands of Harry Potter fans walked into their local bookstore, went straight to the information desk and asked a question pressing on the minds of millions of children around the world: When will the next Harry Potter book be published?

JK Rowling, the British author who invented Harry Potter and the famous Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and her publishers finally announced the date in January 2003. After turning out four Harry Potter books at a rate of one a year until July 2000, Ms Rowling was very late in completing the fifth book which originaly had a publication date of July 2002. She had explained to her agent and publishers that writing this next book was proving to be more difficult than she initially expected. Scholastic, the United States publisher for Ms Rowling's previous books, had told its watchful shareholders only that the company expects to publish the next Harry Potter book some time before June 2003. They were proved to be right.

Although writers missing deadlines may be nothing new, for Harry Potter the failure to publish is a serious matter. A second summer is arriving without a new Harry Potter book to read. Already the unfinished fifth book has become the subject of heated debates about issues like what effect the 11th September terrorist attacks had on Ms Rowling's story outline or which girl stands the best chance of winning Harry's heart.

Bored with rereading the first four books, many of Ms Rowling's youngest fans now congregate online. In the last year, thousands of web sites have sprung up where swelling ranks of visitors eagerly swap their own theories and 'facts' about the progress and contents of the forthcoming book.

"There are, like, millions of web sites," said an 11-year-old fan. "One person told me that JK Rowling got mad at people for pushing her so she decided to start over."

Not so, said Judy Corman, a spokeswoman for Scholastic. Ms Rowling was hard at work and her publishers were patient, she said. "Clearly we understand that her readers are eagerly waiting for it but you can't hurry the creative juices and we understand that," Ms Corman said. "She is writing. She is working hard on the book. We will be happy when we get it." Scholastic never announced a date, she said. Once the manuscript is completed, releasing it will take four or five months.

Scholastic is not the only company with much riding on Ms Rowling's next book. Ms Rowling now sits at the center of a sprawling network of companies capitalizing on the fruits of her imagination. Scholastic alone has sold more than 67 million copies of her first four books, and the appearance of her last book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, bolstered sales at Barnes & Noble and Borders enough to merit special discussion in their quarterly reports.

Amazon.com, the online retailer, accepted preorders for the expected fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. They stopped taking orders for a while because of the delay. Hundreds of thousands of people have asked for e-mail notification when the book arrives.

In the weekend it opened in 2001, the film of Ms Rowling's first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, took in a record $90.3 million for the Warner Brothers division of AOL Time Warner. The sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which opened in 2002, was previously expected to dovetail with the publicity from the new book's release in summer 2002. Toy companies, video-game makers and other companies also now sell a host of related merchandise, counting on new books and films to renew demand.

Success has changed Ms Rowling's life too. She devoted her attention to the making of the film and the licensing of her characters. Ms Rowling was also dating Dr Neil Murray. They married on 26th December 2001 in her recently acquired 19th century Scottish mansion. But their honeymoon was brief so that both newlyweds could get back to work.

Ms Rowling herself has acknowledged feeling 'an edge of external pressure', as she told the magazine Entertainment Weekly in 2000, because of her books' soaring popularity. In her forth book, she ended up deviating for the first time from her preconceived outline for the plot and missed her deadline by two months, she said.

Ms Rowling had also pledged to take on even more delicate subjects in her new book. "There are deaths, more deaths coming," she said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation in December 2001, adding that one character's end will be 'horrible to write'.

And she plans to introduce some of life's other complexities, too. "They are 15 now, hormones working overtime," she told the BBC.

Thousands of teenagers and adults had attempted to fill the gap left by the delay in the fifth book with Harry Potter stories of their own, usually posted on web sites and sometimes running to hundreds of pages.