The first book in the widely renowned Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the book that started it all.

It starts out with us meeting Harry.  The book presents a wizard called Harry Potter and his journey through Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The stories tell of him overcoming dangerous obstacles to defeat the Dark wizard Lord Voldemort who killed his parents when Harry was 15 months old.

The novels revolve around Harry Potter, an orphan who discovers at the age of eleven that he is a wizard, living within the ordinary world of non-magical people, known as Muggles.  His ability is inborn, and such children are invited to attend an exclusive magic school that teaches the necessary skills to succeed in the wizarding world.   Harry becomes a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and it is here where most of the events in the series take place. As Harry develops through his adolescence, he learns to overcome the problems that face him: magical, social and emotional, including ordinary teenage challenges such as friendships, infatuation and exams, and the greater test of preparing himself for the confrontation in the real world that lies ahead.

The environment Rowling created is completely separate from reality yet also intimately connected to it. The wizarding world of Harry Potter exists in parallel within the real world and contains magical versions of the ordinary elements of everyday life. Harry’s first contact with the wizarding world is through a half-giant, Rubeus Hagrid, keeper of grounds and keys at Hogwarts. Hagrid reveals some of Harry’s history. Harry learns that as a baby he witnessed his parents’ murder by the power-obsessed Dark wizard Lord Voldemort, who then attempted to kill him also. For reasons not immediately revealed, the spell with which Voldemort tried to kill Harry rebounded. Harry survived with only a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead as a memento of the attack, and Voldemort disappeared afterwards. As Harry begins to explore the magical world, the reader is introduced to many of the primary locations used throughout the series. Harry meets most of the main characters and gains his two closest friends: Ron Weasley, a fun-loving member of a, large, happy, but poor wizarding family, and Hermione Granger, a gifted and very hardworking witch of muggle family. Harry also encounters the school’s potions master, Severus Snape, who displays a deep and abiding dislike for him, and the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Quirinus Quirrell, who later turns out to be controlled by Lord Voldemort. The plot concludes with Harry’s second confrontation with Lord Voldemort, who in his quest for immortality, yearns to gain the power of the Philosopher’s Stone, a substance that bestows everlasting life.