Final Harry Potter hits shelves in July

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last of seven instalments of the boy wizard's adventures, will be published July 21, author J. K. Rowling announced Thursday on her website.

The book will be available across Canada at one minute past midnight local time on July 21, Canadian publishers Raincoast Books said in a statement.

Rowling's British publisher, Bloomsbury, said it would release a children's hardcover edition, an adult hardcover, a special gift edition and an audio book on the same day.

Rowling has said two characters die in the final book,sparking speculation overwhether Harry is one of them.

"I don't always enjoy killing my characters. I didn't enjoy killing the character who died at the end of Book 6," Rowling said during a reading last summer at Radio City Music Hall in New York, declining to name that person in case someone had yet to finish the book.

"I really didn't enjoy doing that but I had been planning that for years so it wasn't quite as poignant as you might imagine. I'd already done my grieving when I actually came to write it."

Fastest-selling book in Canada

Since the release of the first Harry Potter book 10 years ago, the wildly popular series has sold 325 million copies worldwide and been translated into 64 languages, according to Bloomsbury.

The latest instalment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sold more than two million copies in Britain on the first day of release. It also sold 650,000 copies in Canada on its first weekend, making it the country's fastest-selling book of all time, Raincoast said.

Four feature films based on the books have also been made,with a fifth in the works.

Actor Daniel Radcliffe, 17, who plays Harry in each of the movies, stirred controversy this week by appearing shirtless in promotional photos for the play Equus, in which he appears nude in one scene.