Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the second novel in J. K. Rowling's seven-book series, published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury on 2 July 1998 and in the United States by Scholastic the following June. Rowling has said she found the middle of the book difficult to finish, and the result is denser with school business than its predecessor: a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher who is mostly interested in his own reputation, a duelling club, and a Quidditch season that Rowling keeps interrupting.

The plot turns on the school's own history. Fifty years before Harry arrives, the Chamber of Secrets was opened and a student died, and a boy called Tom Riddle was given an award for catching the person responsible. Harry finds the diary of Tom Riddle during the year, a book that writes back, and the slow discovery that the diary is not a record but a participant is the engine of the last third of the novel. The creature that stalks the corridors is a basilisk, and the Parseltongue Harry can speak without meaning to is what makes the school suspect him.

The book sits in the series as the one that widens the world rather than deepening it: the Weasley family is introduced properly, Hogwarts gets a history, and the political machinery of the wizarding world starts to show its edges. It also sets up the questions about blood status and identity that the later volumes answer, and it remains the most self-contained of the middle novels.