Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a fantasy novel written by British author J. K. Rowling and the sixth and penultimate novel in the "Harry Potter" series. Set during protagonist Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts, the novel explores the past of Harry's nemesis, Lord Voldemort, and Harry's preparations for the final battle against Voldemort alongside his headmaster and mentor Albus Dumbledore. The book was published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury, and in the United States by Scholastic on 16 July 2005, as well as in several other countries. It sold nine
Religious debates over the Harry Potter series was the book launch, but the connection cannot be ruled out." Feiz Mohammad, the Australian radical Islamic preacher believed to have inspired Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing, decried "Harry Potter" for "paganism, evil, magic and the drinking of unicorn blood". Many prominent rabbis have described the "Harry Potter" books as, in the words of one, "a force for good". In 2005, a conference at the University of Reading debated whether Harry Potter had a ""yiddishe neshama"" (Jewish soul). Sir Jonathan Sacks, the former chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth of Nations, claims that, in "a