Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

On his eleventh birthday, Harry Potter learns that he is a wizard — and that the world he has been living in (a cupboard under the stairs in his aunt and uncle’s house in Surrey) is not the only world there is. The world that opens for him at Hogwarts — its staircases and portraits, its ghosts and subjects, its friendships and enemies and the shadow of the war that ended before Harry was old enough to know it — is the most completely imagined place in the history of children’s literature.

J.K. Rowling’s first novel launched a series that has been read by more people in more languages than almost any work of fiction ever written — and the first book remains, in its economy and its inventiveness, the one that best demonstrates why. Every child who has ever felt overlooked, every adult who remembers what it felt like to discover that the world was larger than anyone had told them: this book is for them.

The essential children’s classic — in the Bloomsbury edition. Published by Bloomsbury.