Yes, there’s non-fiction. Yes, there’s also chaos and spice. Both belong here.
✦ The Witch’s Library ✦ 6 min read ✦ Contains affiliate links
I have a complicated relationship with witchy book lists.
Most of them are either completely earnest non-fiction (“Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, obviously!”) or so deep into romantasy that they’ve lost the plot entirely. I wanted something in between. Books that feel genuinely witchy — not just books with a witch on the cover. Books where the magic feels real and the atmosphere makes you want to light a candle and read in the dark.
This is that list. A mix. Chaos allowed.
The Secret History — Donna Tartt
I’m starting here because I have to. If you haven’t read it, I genuinely don’t know what you’ve been doing. A group of classics students at a small Vermont college perform an ancient Greek ritual that goes catastrophically wrong. Murder, obsession, intellectual elitism, and the most atmospheric campus you’ve ever read about.
It’s not witchy in the crystal-and-candle sense. But it understands something deeply true about magic: that it lives in obsession, in ritual, in the specific way a group of people can create their own closed world and worship it. That is witchcraft. I’m not taking questions.
The book that started the dark academia genre. Read it first.
The Atlas Six — Olivie Blake
Six magicians are invited to join the Alexandrian Society — an exclusive secret society with access to the world’s most dangerous knowledge. Only five will make it. Everyone knows this going in. And they still go.
BookTok was right about this one, which I say as someone who is generally suspicious of BookTok. It’s sharp and cerebral and the magic system feels genuinely arcane — not the kind of magic that comes with a wand and a neat explanation. The characters are morally grey in ways that feel earned rather than performed. Olivie Blake understands that the most interesting witches are not good people.
Dark academia with actual magic. The series gets better.
A Lesson in Vengeance — Victoria Lee
A queer boarding school. Legends of witchcraft. A dead girl who may or may not have been a witch. A new student who is very possibly obsessed with finding out the truth.
This one is atmospheric in the way that makes you feel cold. Set at Dalloway School, where the walls have absorbed a hundred years of strange history — and the new literary prodigy Ellis Haley might be recreating some of it. It’s sapphic and haunting and the relationship at the centre of it is the kind of intellectually obsessive dynamic that is my absolute weakness.
For when you want your witchcraft dark, sapphic, and slightly unhinged.
Babel — R.F. Kuang
Oxford, 1830s. A secret tower that powers the British Empire through silver working — a form of translation magic that loses something in every transfer. A group of scholars who slowly realise what they’re participating in.
This is the book I recommend to people who think they don’t like fantasy. It is technically fantasy but it reads like a brutal historical novel about colonialism, language, and complicity. The magic is linguistic and deeply weird and completely unlike anything else I’ve read. It’s also devastating in the way only truly good books are.
Not a cosy read. A necessary one. Also i will never NOT recommend Miss Kuang.
A Discovery of Witches — Deborah Harkness
An academic witch discovers an enchanted manuscript in the Bodleian Library and sets off a chain of events involving vampires, daemons, and a 1,500-year-old Oxford scholar she absolutely should not be falling for.
Look. I know. The romance is a lot. But the witchcraft in this series is some of the most satisfying I’ve encountered in fiction — elemental, ancestral, tied to bloodlines and history and grief. Diana is a genuinely interesting character who has to learn to stop suppressing her power, and that arc is deeply compelling. The Oxford setting is everything. And even as a queer person I can see what our vampire MC got going for himself. Also Matthew Goode NAILED it in the series.
The cosy witchy one. Don’t judge the romance subplot, it earns it.
A Study in Drowning — Ava Reid
A young woman wins a scholarship to study at a prestigious Welsh academy, where the author she’s obsessed with once lived and wrote his famous fairy tales. Except the fairy tales might not be entirely fictional. And the academy has secrets.
This is genuinely one of the best things I read last year. The prose is beautiful in a very specific cold-and-wet way that is hard to describe. The fairy tale elements feel genuinely uncanny — not cute, not Disney, but the kind of old magic that has teeth. The atmosphere is relentless. Highly recommended for anyone who has ever stood in a grey landscape and felt something watching.
Witchy literary fiction. The best kind.
The Once and Future Witches — Alix E. Harrow
Three sisters in 1893 bring back witchcraft — which was driven out of the world centuries ago — by combining suffragette politics with old magic. Spells hidden in nursery rhymes. Power in the voices of women who were told to be quiet.
This book made me cry, which I mention only to warn you. It is about sisterhood and about what happens to women’s magic when it’s suppressed for generations, and it is furious and tender in equal measure. The magic system is constructed around the idea that spells survive in folk songs and stories, passed down without anyone knowing what they were. That is genuinely one of the most interesting witchy concepts I’ve ever encountered in fiction.
The feminist one. Devastating. Read it anyway.
Practical Magic — Alice Hoffman
Two sisters, a cursed family, a small Massachusetts town that fears and needs the Owens women in equal measure. You probably know the film. The book is better.
It’s quieter than the film. More melancholy. The magic is woven into the everyday — it’s in the garden herbs and the aunts’ kitchen and the particular way the Owens women love, which is always too much and always the wrong person. This is the witchy book for people who find magic in real life: in smell and taste and the seasonal rhythms of a place.
The one that understands what witchcraft actually is.
That’s the list. Not exhaustive, obviously — there are approximately one thousand other options and I have opinions about most of them. But these are the ones I’d press into your hands in a dark bookshop and say start here.
What’s on your witchy shelf? Tell me in the comments — I’m always looking for the next one.
