30 Best Books About Witches

Juno Dawson’s inventive and feminist novel (which kicks off a trilogy) imagines a world in which witches operate as part of the British government, and four former childhood friends must navigate a new threat.

Every autumn is time for a rewatch of Practical Magic, featuring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman drinking midnight margaritas. Add to your reading list the original series the film is based on: It’s just as magical as the movie.

More: 25 Best Classic Fall Books

Diana Bishop doesn’t know she’s a descendant of witches until she happens upon an enchanted manuscript in Oxford’s library. The discovery sets off an epic fantasy, where she meets vampire Matthew Clairmont, as she races to solve the mysteries in the book’s pages.

Read more: The 20 Best Books to Read After Finishing A Discovery of Witches

Sorceresses don’t get more classic than the three witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It’s the origin of “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble,” and a must-read in the witchy literary canon.

In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus encounters the magical Circe on the island of Aeaea. Madeline Miller’s novel reimagines this character from Greek mythology, giving the sorceress a full story in this epic read.

Witch Emma Harlow hasn’t been home to Thistle Grove in years, causing her magical powers to wane. But when a spell-casting tournament is held, which requires her family to serve as judge, she returns home, and begins to wonder why she left in the first place.

This historical novel tells the story of enslaved women living on a plantation in the Civil War era-South. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Rue, a young woman who learned healing skills from her mother, May Belle, must navigate what happens when children in the community begin to fall ill.

There are no witches in Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, an astounding work of historical fiction by Rivka Galchen. Instead, Galchen dramatizes the real witchcraft trial of Katharina Kepler, the mother of scientist Johannes Kepler.

Popular culture knows the Witches of Eastwick as the film adaptation starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon, but it’s also a novel by John Updike about three women whose coven in Eastwick, Rhode Island is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious man named Darryl.

In Brenda Lozano’s Witches (translated by Heather Cleary), Zoe is a journalist sent to report on the murder of Paloma, who used to be a healer named Gaspar. Before she was killed, Paloma taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of vigils carried out by Mazatec curanderos.

Witches used to exist, but in 1893, they are just a figment of the past. When the Eastwood sisters join the suffragist movement in New Salem, however, they start to revive the old magic tradition.

This classic work of Russian literature is a “fantastical, funny, and devastating satire of Soviet life,” per the publisher of this 50th Anniversary Edition. The second part follows Margarita, the Master’s mistress who becomes a witch.

Journalist Alex Mar spends five years journeying through the occult in America, writing about real-life witches and witchcraft. “Witches are gathering,” begins Mar’s reported memoir. “Witches are gathering all across California, witches and their apprentices and little children and polyamorous collection of boyfriends and girlfriends…”

The 2005 film Mr. & Mrs. Smith starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as rival spies assigned to kill each other. Mr. & Mrs. Witch is a similar premise: Savannah is a powerful witch, who is unknowingly marrying a witch hunter Griffin. At their wedding, all hell breaks lose—and they’re tasked with killing each other.

Set in the Gilded Age, a trio of witches (Adelaide, Eleanor, and Beatrice) run a tea shop where they tell fortunes and give secret cures to the women who find them.

Anne Rice, perhaps best known for her classic Vampire Chronicles series, also wrote about witches—beginning with The Witching Hour, which follows the Mayfair family over centuries.

Lucky St. James is a Métis millennial, struggling to make ends meet and care for her grandmother, Stella. When she finds a silver spoon etched with the world ‘Salem’ she soon uncovers a network of witches, VenCo (an anagram of “coven”), and sets off on a road trip to New Orleans.

Five generations of witches—beginning in 17th-century France, and continuing through 1940s London—feature in Louisa Morgan’s sweeping historical novel.

A classic children’s book about witches is Eva Ibbotson’s Which Witch?, where handsome wizard Arriman the Awful holds a contest to chose his bride, and powerful witches all join the competition—including Belladonna, who can’t conjure up anything sinister.