Harry Potter
The Harry Potter series of seven fantasy novels was written by English author J. K. Rowling about an adolescent boy wizard named Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. The story is mostly set at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a school for young wizards and witches, and focuses on Harry Potter's fight against the evil wizard Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents as part of his plan to take over the wizarding world.
The success of the Harry Potter franchise has led to a set of stamps being commissioned by Royal Mail, which feature the British children's covers of the seven books.
Harry Potter
Since the release of the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States) in 1997, the books have gained immense popularity, critical acclaim and commercial success worldwide, spawning films, video games and assorted merchandise. The seven books published to date have collectively sold more than 325 million copies and have been translated into more than 64 languages. The seventh and last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released on 21 July 2007. Publishers announced a record-breaking 12 million copies for the first print run in the U.S. alone.
The success of the novels has made Rowling the highest-earning novelist in literary history. English language versions of the books are published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom, Scholastic Press in the United States, Allen & Unwin in Australia and Raincoast Books in Canada.
The first five books have been made into highly successful motion pictures by Warner Bros. The sixth, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is set to begin filming in September 2007, and has a scheduled release of 21 November 2008.
Universe
The wizarding world in which Harry finds himself is both utterly separate from and yet intimately connected to our own world. While the fantasy world of Narnia is an alternative universe and the Lord of the Rings? Middle-earth a mythic past, the wizarding world of Harry Potter exists alongside ours and contains magical elements analogous to things in the non-magical world. Many of its institutions and locations are in towns and cities, including London for example, that are recognisable in the real world. It possesses a fragmented collection of hidden streets, overlooked and ancient pubs, lonely country manors and secluded castles that remain invisible to the non-magical population (known as "Muggles"; e.g., The Dursleys). Wizard ability is inborn, rather than learned, although one must attend schools such as Hogwarts in order to master and control it. However it is possible for wizard parents to have children who are born with little or no magical ability at all (known as "Squibs"; e.g., Mrs. Figg, Argus Filch). Since one is either born a wizard or not, most wizards are unfamiliar with the Muggle world, which appears stranger to them than their world does to us. The magical world and its many fantastic elements are depicted in a matter-of-fact way. This juxtaposition of the magical and the mundane is one of the principal motifs in the novels; the characters in the stories live normal lives with normal problems, for all their magical surroundings.
Chronology
The books mainly avoid setting the story in a particular real year; however, there are a few references which allow the books and various past events mentioned in them to be assigned corresponding real years . The timeline is sufficiently set in Chamber of Secrets, in which Nearly-Headless Nick remarks that it is the five-hundredth anniversary of his death on October 31, 1492; thus, Chamber of Secrets takes place from 1992 to 1993. This chronology was again reiterated in Deathly Hallows, in which the date of death on James and Lily Potter's gravestone is October 31, 1981. Thus, as Harry was a year old at the time of his parents' murders, his year of birth is 1980 and the main action of the story takes place from 1991 (beginning of Sorcerer's Stone) to 1998 (end of Deathly Hallows).