50+ Books if You Like Harry Potter [for Children and Adults]

Few books have shaped the reading habits of an entire generation the way the Harry Potter series did. For international students juggling Master’s and PhD research from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia, fantasy fiction is often more than a hobby — it is a creative reset between long days of literature reviews and supervisor feedback. The list below pulls together 50+ books like Harry Potter, sorted by age group, with notes on which ones double as serious research material for those of you studying children’s literature, mythopoesis or narrative theory.

Quick Answer: What to Read After Harry Potter

If you loved Harry Potter, the closest replacements are Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Rick Riordan), His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman), The Magicians (Lev Grossman), The Bartimaeus Sequence (Jonathan Stroud) and A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin). These five capture the four ingredients that made Harry Potter work — a hidden magical school or world, a young protagonist coming of age, moral choices with consequences, and rich friendships. Younger readers should start with Percy Jackson; adult readers will find more depth in Grossman, Le Guin and Pullman.

Why a Reading List Matters During Your Research Journey

Postgraduate research is exhausting. International students reading this from Toronto, Sydney, Manchester, Riyadh, Nairobi or Singapore know that the months between proposal approval and final submission can feel like one long, grey corridor. A reading list of beloved fantasy novels is not a distraction — it is a tool. Three reasons it matters:

• Sustained-attention training. A 600-page novel rebuilds the focus muscle that doom-scrolling weakens. That same muscle is what you need to push through Chapter 4 of your thesis.
• Narrative scaffolding. Even quantitative researchers narrate findings. Reading well-structured stories sharpens your sense of beginning, middle and end — useful for any discussion chapter.
• Primary source material. If your dissertation touches young-adult literature, gender in fiction, postcolonial readings, education sociology or media studies, every book on this list is a legitimate object of study.

Researchers who have already turned their love of fantasy into their thesis topic often go on to write a popular book about it. That is exactly the journey our book writing & publication service is designed to support, from synopsis to ISBN-registered paperback.

15 Books for Middle-Grade Readers (Ages 8–12)

These pick up where Harry Potter book one left off — magic schools, friendships, quests, and stakes that feel huge without becoming bleak. They suit younger readers in your family, school placement work, or any thesis on early-reader fantasy.

The five everyone should read first

1. Percy Jackson and the Olympians — Rick Riordan. Greek mythology meets a New York demigod boarding camp.
2. The Bartimaeus Sequence — Jonathan Stroud. A snarky djinn in an alternate magical London.
3. A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin. The original wizard-school coming-of-age, deeper than its page count suggests.
4. Howl’s Moving Castle — Diana Wynne Jones. JK Rowling has cited Wynne Jones as a direct influence.
5. Artemis Fowl — Eoin Colfer. A criminal-mastermind twelve-year-old and an underground fairy police force.

Ten more strong middle-grade picks

6. Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle) — Christopher Paolini
7. Septimus Heap — Angie Sage
8. The Spiderwick Chronicles — Tony DiTerlizzi & Holly Black
9. The Land of Stories — Chris Colfer
10. Magisterium — Holly Black & Cassandra Clare
11. The Mysterious Benedict Society — Trenton Lee Stewart
12. The Worst Witch — Jill Murphy (the original British boarding-school witch story)
13. The Dark is Rising — Susan Cooper
14. A Wrinkle in Time — Madeleine L’Engle
15. Charlie Bone (Children of the Red King) — Jenny Nimmo

20 Books for Teen and Young Adult Readers

For readers fifteen and up — including most undergraduates and early postgrads — the next list adds romance, ethical ambiguity and more sophisticated world-building. These are also the books most frequently cited in YA-literature theses.

The five you cannot skip

1. His Dark Materials — Philip Pullman. Probably the most intellectually demanding response to Harry Potter ever written.
2. The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis. The Oxford-don ancestor of almost every magical-world series.
3. Six of Crows — Leigh Bardugo. A heist crew in a magical version of Amsterdam.
4. Children of Blood and Bone — Tomi Adeyemi. West-African-inspired magic; a regular thesis text for postcolonial fantasy.
5. The Cruel Prince — Holly Black. Modern faerie courts, morally grey characters.

Fifteen more YA recommendations

6. The Hunger Games — Suzanne Collins
7. Divergent — Veronica Roth
8. The Mortal Instruments — Cassandra Clare
9. Shadow and Bone — Leigh Bardugo
10. The Raven Cycle — Maggie Stiefvater
11. Akata Witch — Nnedi Okorafor (often called the “Nigerian Harry Potter”)
12. An Ember in the Ashes — Sabaa Tahir
13. The Lunar Chronicles — Marissa Meyer
14. Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard — Rick Riordan
15. Carry On — Rainbow Rowell (a knowing take on the chosen-one school story)
16. Skulduggery Pleasant — Derek Landy
17. The Inheritance Cycle (later books) — Christopher Paolini
18. The Magicians (read as YA crossover) — Lev Grossman
19. A Discovery of Witches — Deborah Harkness
20. Truthwitch (The Witchlands) — Susan Dennard

15+ Books for Adult Readers and PhD Researchers

Once you cross into postgraduate life, the children-of-destiny structure starts to feel familiar. The books below offer the same emotional warmth as Harry Potter but with adult prose, complex morality and themes worth a literature-review citation.

The five we recommend most to PhD readers

1. The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss. Beautiful sentences and a university-of-magic frame.
2. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke. English Regency footnotes meet practical magic; a frequent subject of doctoral monographs.
3. The Night Circus — Erin Morgenstern. Atmospheric, slow-magic literary fantasy.
4. Piranesi — Susanna Clarke. A short, philosophical jewel that PhD researchers consistently love.
5. Mistborn — Brandon Sanderson. The benchmark for “hard” magic systems.

Twelve more grown-up recommendations

6. The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
7. The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien
8. The Earthsea Cycle (later volumes) — Ursula K. Le Guin
9. The Stormlight Archive — Brandon Sanderson
10. American Gods — Neil Gaiman
11. Neverwhere — Neil Gaiman
12. The Discworld novels — Terry Pratchett (start with Mort or Guards! Guards!)
13. Good Omens — Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
14. The Ten Thousand Doors of January — Alix E. Harrow
15. Uprooted — Naomi Novik
16. The Bear and the Nightingale — Katherine Arden
17. The Priory of the Orange Tree — Samantha Shannon

Several of these — particularly Clarke, Pullman, Le Guin and Pratchett — appear regularly in published Master’s and PhD theses on contemporary fantasy. If you are weighing one of them as a primary text, our PhD thesis & synopsis service can help you scope a research question that examiners will approve.

How These Books Can Inspire Your Academic Writing

Reading fantasy alongside your research is not just escapism. The skills overlap is real.

1. World-building teaches structured argumentation

Authors like Sanderson and Tolkien build magic systems with explicit rules, internal consistency and defined limits. That is the same logical scaffolding that a strong methodology chapter needs. If you can spot the difference between Sanderson’s “hard” magic and Rowling’s “soft” magic, you are already thinking like an academic critic.

2. Character arcs teach thesis statements

Every protagonist in this list starts the book believing one thing and ends believing something different, with the journey justifying the change. That is the structure of a good research argument too. We have a full guide on writing a perfect thesis statement that walks through this in detail.

3. Long-form pacing teaches dissertation pacing

An 800-page novel that holds your attention is a masterclass in pacing. The same principles — setup, complication, midpoint shift, resolution — apply to a 60,000-word dissertation. Notice when an author slows down for reflection and when they accelerate, and copy the moves into your discussion chapter.

Turning Your Love of Stories Into a Thesis or a Book

If reading this list has made you want to write rather than just read, you have two clear academic paths.

Path 1: Make fantasy fiction the subject of your research

Strong, supervisor-friendly research topics include:

• Postcolonial readings of African and South-Asian fantasy (Okorafor, Adeyemi, Roshani Chokshi).
• Gender, agency and consent in YA fantasy of the 2010s.
• Mythopoesis from Tolkien to Sanderson — a comparative study of invented mythologies.
• Reader-response and fan-fiction communities as participatory literary cultures.
• Translation and cross-cultural reception of the Harry Potter series in your home country.

Each of these works as a Master’s dissertation or a PhD chapter. For a structured proposal that meets your university’s rubric — whether you are in the UK Russell Group, an Australian Go8, or a Tier-1 US research university — our SCOPUS journal publication service can also help you turn that chapter into a peer-reviewed paper.

Path 2: Write your own fantasy book

Plenty of postgraduate researchers have a novel manuscript in a drawer. If yours is closer to finished than you admit, we offer a full author-support journey through our book writing & publication service — structural editing, professional cover, ISBN registration and royalty-friendly distribution. For the academic-fiction crossover, we have written separately about academic writing skills that transfer to long-form storytelling.

Frequently Asked Questions

What books are similar to Harry Potter for adult readers?

For grown-up readers, the closest in spirit are Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. All five carry the same sense of hidden magical worlds and moral complexity but with prose more suited to graduate readers.

Can I write my Master’s or PhD thesis on Harry Potter?

Yes. Harry Potter is one of the most cited primary texts in twenty-first-century children’s-literature scholarship. PhD theses on the series exist in education studies, gender studies, theology, translation studies and cultural sociology. Our PhD specialists can help you scope a question that is both fresh and supervisor-approved.

Which Harry Potter alternative is best for children aged 8 to 12?

Start with Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, then move to Jonathan Stroud’s The Bartimaeus Sequence, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. These are all pitched perfectly for middle-grade readers.

How can reading fantasy help my academic writing?

Fantasy reading rebuilds sustained attention, sharpens narrative structure and expands vocabulary — three habits that transfer directly into dissertation work. Many of our PhD experts read fiction deliberately, the way athletes cross-train.

Can you help me publish a fantasy novel or a research book?

Yes. Our book writing and publication service walks researchers and first-time authors through manuscript development, structural editing, ISBN registration, cover design and royalty-friendly publishing — whether the book is a YA fantasy debut or a scholarly monograph.