EDINBURGH, Scotland - Harry Potter's life hangs in the balance. Millions of fans are holding their breath. Meanwhile, his creator is baking a cake -- and keeping her secret.
On Saturday, readers around the globe will learn the schoolboy wizard's fate with the publication of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling's fantasy series. Will Harry defeat his evil nemesis, Lord Voldemort, and restore order to the wizarding world? Will he die in the attempt, as many fans fear -- and as Rowling, an expert narrative tease, has hinted?
"Harry's story comes to a definite end in book seven,'' is all she will say a few days before publication, serving up tea and home-baked sponge cake in her comfortable Edinburgh house. Writing the final words of the saga felt "like a bereavement.''
That sounds ominously final. So have we really seen the last of the staff and students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?
"Because the world is so big, there would be room to do other stuff,'' Rowling says carefully. "I am not planning to do that, but I'm not going to say I'm never going to do it.''
Rowling (her name rhymes with bowling, rather than howling), looking relaxed in jeans and a sweater, shoulder-length blond hair stylishly cut, has wildly mixed emotions at leaving behind the character she conjured up during a train journey across England in 1990: a neglected, bespectacled orphan who learns on his 11th birthday that he is a wizard.
She's enjoying the absence of pressure from publishers and fans clamouring for the next instalment in Harry's adventures. And she's revelling in the chance to focus on normal life with her husband and three children.
But after finishing the last book, "I felt terrible for a week.''
"The first two days in particular, it was like a bereavement, even though I was pleased with the book. And then after a week that cloud lifted and I felt quite lighthearted, quite liberated,'' she says.
"Finishing is emotional because the books have been so wrapped up with my life. It's almost impossible not to finish and look back to where I was when I started.''
It has been an extraordinary journey. When Rowling created Harry Potter, she was a struggling single mother, writing in cafes to save on the heating bill at home. Now, at 41, she is the richest woman in Britain -- worth $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine -- with houses in Edinburgh, London and the Scottish countryside.
Her first book, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,'' was published in 1997, with a print run of less than 1,000. Rowling's publisher suggested she use gender-neutral initials rather than her first name, Joanne, to give the book a better chance with boys. Lacking a middle name, she took the K from her paternal grandmother, Kathleen.
By the time the book appeared in the United States in 1998 -- as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'' -- Harry was on his way to becoming a publishing phenomenon.
The six Potter books have sold some 325 million copies in 64 languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek. "Deathly Hallows'' has an initial print run of 12 million in the United States alone; more than two million copies have been ordered from Internet retailer Amazon.
The novels have produced five movies, mountains of toys, a riot of Internet fan sites and scores of companion books -- from academic studies to parodies to pop psychology. A theme park, complete with Hogwarts castle and Forbidden Forest, is to open in Orlando, Fla., in 2009.
The launch of each new book is now accompanied by choreographed chaos and military-level security. No book is sold until a minute past midnight on Saturday.
The series' success has been "a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon,'' said Joel Rickett, news editor of trade magazine The Bookseller. "It has brought a new generation to reading -- got kids absorbed in huge hefty hardbacks the way they wouldn't have been,'' he said.
While some critics have dismissed the books as lightweight kiddie fare, others have been impressed by their moral complexity and darkening tone. Death haunts Harry Potter, who was orphaned at the age of one when Voldemort killed his parents. He loses his godfather Sirius Black in the fifth book and his beloved headmaster Dumbledore in the sixth. No wonder fans fear for Harry's future.
Rowling was profoundly affected by the death of her own mother from multiple sclerosis in 1990 at the age of 45.
"My mum died six months into writing (the books), and I think that set the central theme -- this boy dealing with loss,'' Rowling says.
And she makes no apologies for exposing children to death.
"I think children are very scared of this stuff even if they haven't experienced it, and I think the way to meet that is head-on,'' she says. "I absolutely believe, as a writer and as a parent, that the solution is not to pretend things don't happen but to examine them in a loving, safe way.''
Rowling says her success has been "the experience of a lifetime.'' But it also has brought an intense level of pressure, scrutiny and criticism. In the United States, her book tours have attracted thousands of screaming children, but also death threats. Some Christians have called for the books to be banned, claiming they promote witchcraft.
But it's only now that she realizes just how intense the pressure has been at the centre of the Harry Potter whirlwind.
"I was very lonely with it,'' she says. "It's not like being in a pop group, where at least there would be three or four other people who knew what it was like to be on the inside. Only I knew what it was like to be generating this world as it became bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more people were invested in it.
After producing a book a year between 1997 and 2000, Rowling took a break. There was a three-year gap between the fourth book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,'' published in 2003. During the gap, Rowling met and married Neil Murray, a Scottish doctor. They live in Edinburgh with their children David, 4, and Mackenzie, 2, as well as Jessica, Rowling's daughter from her first marriage to a Portuguese journalist.
Rowling now seems reconciled to her success. She says she lives a normal life and is rarely recognized in the street, although her grey stone town house on a tree-lined street is protected by an 2.5-metre stone wall and iron security gates. Like the neighbourhood -- a leafy literary enclave that's also home to crime novelist Ian Rankin and "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency'' writer Alexander McCall Smith -- the house exudes solid affluence, rather than extravagance.
The modestly sized lawn holds a soccer net and a colourful plastic jumble of children's toys. In the tidy family room are crowded bookshelves, an aquarium, photo albums and board games -- the trappings of any middle-class family's life.
Rowling predicts that some of Harry's fans will dislike "Deathly Hallows.'' But she is proud of it. "The final book is what it was always supposed to be, and so I feel very at peace with that fact,'' she says.
As for the future, she says she has no plans.
"I can never write anything as popular again,'' she said. "Lightning does not strike in the same place twice.
"I'll do exactly what I did with Harry -- I'll write what I really want to write, and if it's something similar, that's OK, and if it's something very different, that's OK.
"I just really want to fall in love with an idea again, and go with that.''
