The first trip down Diagon Alley makes you wonder what else might be hiding in an ordinary street. By the time Harry reaches Hogwarts, there’s another reason to keep reading. You want to know which rules matter, who can be trusted, and what’s behind the door everyone tells him to leave alone.
That first read can be hard to recapture because it gave readers several pleasures at once. You might miss the friendships more than the spells. You might want a mystery that makes an odd detail from chapter two suddenly matter. These nine fantasy books for adults each bring back a different part of that experience.
Start with A Deadly Education if you miss learning the rules of a magical school. Pick Piranesi if you want the wonder of discovering an impossible place, or The Tainted Cup if you spent your first read trying to solve the mystery ahead of Harry.
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1. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
Read it if you miss: Learning how a magical school works alongside its students.
At the Scholomance, even a trip to the library can turn deadly. El Higgins has a talent for devastating magic and good reason to keep it under wraps. Orion Lake, the classmate who keeps saving people, complicates her plans to survive school without drawing too much attention.
This is the closest match for readers who want classrooms, rivalries, and school rules worth puzzling over. The pleasure is in figuring out why El makes choices that look reckless until you understand the system she’s navigating. It’s sharper and more perilous than the early Hogwarts books, with a narrator who has an opinion about practically everything. This opens the completed Scholomance trilogy.
2. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Read it if you miss: Opening a door and realizing the world is bigger than you thought.
Piranesi lives in a House of seemingly endless halls. Statues line the rooms, and the sea can surge up the staircases. He keeps track of the tides in his journals. As you get used to the rhythm of his entries, you start noticing things he has little reason to question.
I gave Piranesi five stars. Part of what stayed with me was the way a strange place becomes familiar through one person’s affection for it. The opening asks for patience, especially if you’re used to fantasy that explains the world up front. Give the journals a chance, and you’ll soon have questions of your own. It’s also a standalone you can finish without committing to a series. Read more about why Piranesi stayed with me.
3. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
Read it if you miss: Suspecting that the author put the answer in front of you chapters ago.
A tree erupts from a man’s body, leaving investigator Ana Dolabra and her assistant Din to work out how it got there. Din can recall what he’s observed with extraordinary precision. Ana knows which details to ask for, and her questions make you reconsider scenes you thought you understood.
I rated this one 4.5 stars. It scratches the same itch as an Agatha Christie mystery, with the added pleasure of discovering what counts as evidence in a world where people use biology to transform bodies and buildings. If you want a fast-moving investigation with an answer you can test against the clues, start here. Read the full Tainted Cup review.
4. A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab
Read it if you miss: The thrill of finding magic tucked into a familiar city.
Kell can travel among parallel versions of London. He carries official messages between rulers and smuggles things on the side, a habit that catches up with him when a dangerous object crosses worlds. A thief named Delilah Bard gets drawn into the trouble, and she’s just as eager as the reader to see what lies beyond the London she knows.
Schwab gets a lot of mileage out of showing you the same city under different conditions. Once you’ve seen magic treated as a normal part of life in one London, the hunger for it in another feels more unsettling. This is the pick for readers who want a quick adventure with more than one world to explore.
Find A Darker Shade of Magic on Amazon!
5. The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Read it if you miss: Watching an outsider find people who make him feel at home.
Linus Baker works for a government department that oversees magical children. He’s sent to inspect an island orphanage, where the children’s personalities complicate the tidy categories his office uses to describe them.
The funny, awkward early encounters are what make this a good choice if your favorite Hogwarts scenes were the ones between adventures. The children slowly come to feel familiar, and you can see Linus’s priorities changing in the attention he pays them. Pick this when you want a warmer story and a cast you’ll enjoy spending time with.
6. The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty
Read it if you miss: Arriving with a newcomer who has to learn the history everyone else takes for granted.
Nahri makes her living conning people in Cairo until she accidentally summons a djinn warrior. Her journey to Daevabad puts her among people who know more about her heritage than she does and who have their own reasons for explaining it the way they do.
The arrival in Daevabad delivers the excitement of being shown a city you want to explore, followed by the realization that you’ll need to learn whom to trust. If the later Harry Potter books made you curious about what the magical world teaches its children about its own past, there’s plenty to get into here. This begins the completed Daevabad trilogy. Find more completed fantasy series worth reading.
7. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Read it if you miss: Finding a clue inside a book and wanting to follow it wherever it leads.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins opens an unusual library book and discovers a story about an incident from his own childhood. Trying to understand how it got there leads him toward a hidden world where stories have rooms of their own.
Morgenstern lets smaller tales interrupt Zachary’s search, giving you time to wonder how a symbol or an image might turn up again. It’s the slowest pick here, best for a reader who’s happy to linger with an unanswered question. If you still think about what it would feel like to find a hidden door in an ordinary building, this is your book.
8. The Rook by Daniel O’Malley
Read it if you miss: Discovering that magical Britain has an entire bureaucracy of its own.
Myfanwy Thomas comes to in a London park surrounded by bodies. She has no memory of her life, but the woman she used to be left instructions. Following them sends her back to work at a secret agency that deals with supernatural threats, where someone has reason to want her gone.
The letters are what make this so much fun. They offer the satisfaction of getting hold of a confidential guide to a world you’ve only just entered, and they leave Myfanwy room to decide what to do with the information. Choose it if you want magical office politics, odd powers, and a conspiracy that keeps the pages moving.
9. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Read it if you miss: The idea that a school for magic could offer a way into the life you’ve always wanted.
Quentin Coldwater has long loved the children’s books about Fillory. When he’s admitted to Brakebills, a secret college for magic, he gets a chance to pursue something he’s wanted for years. Learning magic takes real work, and getting good at it leaves him with decisions that an acceptance letter could never make for him.
This is the most disenchanted school story on the list. Grossman is interested in what happens after the thrill of being admitted wears off and a person has to decide what they expect from magic. Pick it if that question sounds as absorbing as the school itself. It opens a completed trilogy.
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