Thousands of Harry Potter fans poured into book stores in Ireland and across the globe early this morning as the seventh and final volume in the series went on sale, and for many the secret of the boy wizard's fate was only hours away.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallowshit the shelves across most of the world at 11pm last night, in a release carefully orchestrated to maximise suspense and sales from Tokyo and New York to Taiwan and Australia's Outback.
It is estimated up to 250,000 copies of the book will be sold in Ireland in the next few days.
Harry Potter parties were held at all 42 Eason stores; all branches of Dubray books; and Hughes and Hughes stores in St Stephen's Green, Santry, Nutgrove, Dún Laoghaire, Swords, Dundalk, Galway, Wexford, and Ennis. Libraries also celebrated the end of the line for Harry with midnight openings or parties.
Dressed as witches, Death Eaters and plain old non-magical Muggles, die-hard followers from dozens of countries braved heavy rain in London to join the queue outside and got up at the crack of dawn in Australia and India to get hold of an early copy.
There was a mixture of excitement and regret among the crowds in New York, where stores decided to wait until midnight local time to release Deathly Hallows, leaving them several hours behind the rest of the world.
"It's like losing part of my childhood," said William Bishop (16) dressed as Harry Potter complete with a scar on his forehead. In Sydney, about 1,500 Potter fans rode two steam trains from the city centre to a secret destination where bookstore staff were preparing to hand out copies of the book.Early reviews, some of them appearing before the official publication date, were overwhelmingly positive.
"This chest-crusher of a book ends the Harry Potter series with a bang," said Kate Muir in the Times.
plot hatched over 17 years of writing clicks into place, loose ends interlocking, all as complex as a magical lock at Hogwarts Castle."
Book store chains in Britain said first-night sales eclipsed even those of the sixth Harry Potter volume.
"We've sold 100,000 copies in the first two hours across the business in the UK," said Fiona Allen of Waterstone's. "That has outstripped anything we've sold before."
The WH Smith chain sold 15 books every second across Britain overnight, breaking the record set by the previous Potter instalment of 13 per second in 2005.
Online retailer Amazon.com received 2.2 million pre-orders for "Deathly Hallows", up 47 percent on book six, and 12 million copies were printed for the US market alone.
The excitement came despite plot leaks on the Internet, some of which proved to be genuine. A mistake by one US online retailer also meant up to 1,200 copies were sent to buyers several days early.
Rowling, credited with putting the fun back into reading for millions of children and adults, said she was "staggered" when two US newspapers ran reviews on Thursday.
Just 13 years ago, the 41-year-old was an unemployed single mother, without a publisher or agent, but is now the world's first dollar billionaire writer having sold over 325 million books so far.