By J. K. Rowling
The first Harry Potter, painted spread by spread by Jim Kay — the copy you keep on the shelf for good.
Harry Potter is an unwanted orphan who sleeps in the cupboard under his aunt and uncle's stairs, until letters start arriving on his eleventh birthday. He's a wizard. And his parents didn't die in a car crash, the way he was always told: a dark wizard named Voldemort murdered them, tried to kill baby Harry the same night, and for reasons nobody understands failed. Harry heads off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, gets sorted into Gryffindor, makes his first real friends in Ron and Hermione, learns to fly a broomstick and play the wizard sport Quidditch, and stumbles onto a secret buried deep in the castle. Something hidden there can make its owner live forever, and someone frightening means to take it. What sets this edition apart is Jim Kay's art: full-color paintings on nearly every spread, from Diagon Alley to the sorting feast to the troll in the bathroom to the enormous three-headed dog, so there's as much to linger over as there is to read.
Give this to a child already deep in Harry Potter, or one just about to fall in. Jim Kay spent years painting it, and you can see where the time went: a big, heavy volume where Hogwarts looks the way it does inside your child's head, only better. The story is the warmest and funniest of the seven, still full of sweets and moving staircases and the feeling of finally belonging somewhere, before the series grows up and gets much darker in the later books. If your child has worn out the movies, there's far more waiting here, and the sheer size and weight of the book make it feel like something.