15 Books Like Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games is the young adult series most often mentioned alongside Harry Potter, and the comparison makes sense even though the genres are very different. Both series follow a young protagonist who is thrust into a life-or-death situation by forces beyond their control, and both build across multiple books toward a confrontation with a corrupt political system. Katniss Everdeen's arena is not Hogwarts, but the experience of reading about her, of caring about her survival and rooting for her rebellion, taps into the same emotional engine that makes Harry's story so powerful. If you loved Harry Potter for the feeling of watching a young person find courage they did not know they had, The Hunger Games delivers that with a grittier, more politically charged edge.

Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . . In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight might seem like an odd recommendation for Harry Potter fans, but millions of readers moved directly from one series to the other, and the reason is the immersive quality of both. Rowling built Hogwarts; Meyer built Forks, Washington, with its perpetual rain, its forest-shrouded vampire family, and its forbidden romance. Both series create worlds that readers want to live inside, and both centre on a protagonist discovering that the mundane world conceals something extraordinary. If what you loved most about Harry Potter was the feeling of escapism, of stepping through the wardrobe or onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and leaving your own life behind, Twilight offers that same transportive quality wrapped in a paranormal romance.

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him - and I didn't know how dominant that part might be - that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him. Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight is a love story with bite.

Tolkien's The Hobbit is the foundation that all modern fantasy, including Harry Potter, is built on. Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable hobbit who wants nothing more than a quiet life, is pulled into an adventure by the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves seeking to reclaim their homeland from a dragon. The parallels to Harry are direct: an unassuming hero, a wise wizard mentor, a quest that reveals hidden courage, and a world so richly imagined that it has sustained an entire cultural ecosystem for nearly a century. Rowling has acknowledged Tolkien's influence on her work, and reading The Hobbit after Harry Potter feels like meeting the grandfather of everything you love. If you want the origin of the genre Harry Potter belongs to, start here.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent. The text in this 372-page paperback edition is based on that first published in Great Britain by Collins Modern Classics (1998), and includes a note on the text by Douglas A. Anderson (2001). 9780618260300

Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief is the book most frequently recommended to Harry Potter fans, and for good reason. Percy Jackson discovers he is the son of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, and is sent to Camp Half-Blood, a training facility for demigods that functions as a mythology-flavoured Hogwarts. Riordan brings the same warmth, humour, and sense of wonder to Greek mythology that Rowling brings to witchcraft, and Percy is a protagonist with Harry's same mix of reluctance, loyalty, and bravery. The series grows darker as it progresses, just as Harry Potter does, and Riordan's ability to make ancient myths feel relevant and exciting for modern readers is a genuine gift. If you want a book series similar to Harry Potter with a different mythological foundation, Percy Jackson is the answer.

The first book in the New York Times best-selling saga with a cover image and an 8-page photo insert from the Disney+ series! Read the book that launched Percy Jackson into the stratosphere before the Disney+ series comes out! Lately, mythological monsters and the Olympian gods seem to be walking straight out of the pages of Percy Jackson’s Greek mythology textbook and into his life. Zeus's master lightning bolt has been stolen, and Percy is the prime suspect. Percy and his friends have just ten days to find and return Zeus's stolen property and bring peace to a warring Mount Olympus. Whether you are new to Percy or a longtime fan, this tie-in paperback edition with full-color photos from the Disney+ series is a must-have for your library.

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars is not fantasy, and it does not involve any magic, but it captures something essential about the Harry Potter reading experience: the feeling of caring desperately about fictional characters. Hazel and Augustus are teenagers with cancer who fall in love, and Green writes their relationship with an intelligence and emotional honesty that makes you forget they are not real. The connection to Harry Potter is the emotional investment. If Rowling taught you what it feels like to cry over a book, to genuinely grieve for a character, Green delivers that same emotional punch in a realistic contemporary setting.

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten. Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the book your English teacher wanted you to read, and it connects to Harry Potter through the theme of moral courage. Scout Finch, growing up in 1930s Alabama, watches her father Atticus defend a Black man falsely accused of assault in a town consumed by racism. Atticus Finch and Albus Dumbledore share a fundamental quality: both are men who do what is right even when it costs them everything, and both teach the children in their care that courage means standing up for people who cannot stand up for themselves. If Harry Potter shaped your understanding of right and wrong, To Kill a Mockingbird is the novel that does the same thing without magic.

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable coming-of-age tale in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage iniquities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father — a crusading local lawyer — risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Veronica Roth's Divergent takes the Harry Potter sorting concept and pushes it into darker territory. In a dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions based on personality traits, and sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose which faction to join for life. The sorting ceremony echoes the Sorting Hat, but the consequences are permanent and violent. Roth writes Tris's journey from Abnegation to Dauntless with the same coming-of-age intensity that Rowling brings to Harry's years at Hogwarts, and the series builds toward a revelation about the faction system itself that mirrors Harry's gradual understanding that the wizarding world's institutions are deeply flawed. If you loved the house system at Hogwarts and want to see what happens when that concept is taken to its most extreme conclusion, Divergent is the answer.

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue: Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is, she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself. During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris, and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together, they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are, and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes-fascinating, sometimes-exasperating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret: one she’s kept hidden from everyone, because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly-perfect society, she also learns that her secret might be what helps her save those she loves...or it might be what destroys her. .

Anne Frank's diary is a real document, not a novel, but its presence on a Harry Potter list makes more sense than you might think. Both are stories about young people finding courage in impossible circumstances. Anne wrote while hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic for two years; Harry fights a dark wizard who represents many of the same evils. Frank's voice, funny, sharp, honest about her fears and desires, has the same quality that makes Harry's perspective so engaging: you are inside the mind of someone young who is dealing with something far too big for them, and watching them find grace under pressure. If Harry Potter made you care about how young people face evil, Anne Frank's diary is the real-world version of that story.

Anne Frank's extraordinary diary, written in the Amsterdam attic where she and her family hid from the Nazis for two years, has become a world classic and a timeless testament to the human spirit. Now, in a new edition enriched by many passages originally withheld by her father, we meet an Anne more real, more human, and more vital than ever. Here she is first and foremost a teenage girl—stubbornly honest, touchingly vulnerable, in love with life. She imparts her deeply secret world of soul-searching and hungering for affection, rebellious clashes with her mother, romance and newly discovered sexuality, and wry, candid observations of her companions. Facing hunger, fear of discovery and death, and the petty frustrations of such confined quarters, Anne writes with adult wisdom and views beyond her years. Her story is that of every teenager, lived out in conditions few teenagers have ever known.

C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the other great British portal fantasy, and its influence on Harry Potter is visible everywhere. Four children step through a wardrobe into Narnia, a land ruled by a tyrannical White Witch, and must help the lion Aslan defeat her. The parallels to Harry Potter are structural: ordinary children discover a hidden magical world, find they have a role to play in a cosmic battle between good and evil, and grow into their courage through the experience. Lewis writes with a clarity and warmth that Rowling clearly admired, and reading the Narnia books after Harry Potter feels like visiting a close relative. If you want more British fantasy with the same sense of wonder and moral seriousness, this is where to go.

They open a door and enter a world NARNIA...the land beyond the wardrobe, the secret country known only to Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy...the place where the adventure begins. Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first, no one believes her when she tells of her adventures in the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund and then Peter and Susan discover the Magic and meet Aslan, the Great Lion, for themselves. In the blink of an eye, their lives are changed forever.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a very different kind of book from Harry Potter, but it connects through the theme of reinvention and the gap between appearance and reality. Jay Gatsby has built an entire identity around a dream, much as Voldemort built Tom Riddle into something monstrous, and the novel explores what happens when that constructed identity collides with truth. Fitzgerald writes 1920s America with the same atmospheric density that Rowling brings to the wizarding world, and the prose is some of the most beautiful in the English language. If Harry Potter gave you a love of reading and you want to explore where that love can take you as an adult reader, Gatsby is one of the great rewards of literary fiction.

Alternate covers of this ISBN can be found here, here and here. James L. W. West III to include the author’s final revisions and features a note on the composition and text, a personal foreword by Fitzgerald’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan—and a new introduction by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is two centuries old and still as readable as anything published last year, which is a quality it shares with the best Harry Potter books. Austen writes Elizabeth Bennet with the same sharp intelligence and stubborn independence that Rowling gives Hermione Granger, and the novel's exploration of first impressions, prejudice, and the slow recognition of someone's true character mirrors the way Harry gradually comes to understand Snape. The connection is the quality of the character writing: Austen, like Rowling, creates people who feel completely alive on the page. If Harry Potter made you a reader, Pride and Prejudice is the classic that will make you a reader for life.

Pride and Prejudice has charmed generations of readers for more than two centuries. Jane Austen's much-adapted novel is famed for its witty, spirited heroine, sensational romances, and deft remarks on the triumphs and pitfalls of social convention. Author Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist whose works of social realism achieved unprecedented critical and popular success, though Austen herself remained an anonymous writer throughout her life.

George Orwell's 1984 is the dystopian novel that casts the longest shadow, and it connects to Harry Potter through the theme of resistance against totalitarian power. The Ministry of Magic's corruption in the later Harry Potter books, with its propaganda, its persecution of Muggle-borns, and its use of fear to maintain control, is directly influenced by Orwell's vision of a state that controls not just behaviour but thought itself. 1984 is darker and bleaker than anything in Harry Potter, but readers who grew up with the series and want to explore its political themes in an adult context will find Orwell's masterpiece the logical next step. If Umbridge's takeover of Hogwarts made your blood boil, 1984 will make it freeze.

A masterpiece of rebellion and imprisonment where war is peace freedom is slavery and Big Brother is watching. Thought Police, Big Brother, Orwellian - these words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984. The story of one man's Nightmare Odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory 1984 is a prophetic haunting tale More relevant than ever before 1984 exposes the worst crimes imaginable the destruction of truth freedom and individuality. With a foreword by Thomas Pynchon. This beautiful paperback edition features deckled edges and french flaps a perfect gift for any occasion Alternate cover edition can be found here.

E.B. White's Charlotte's Web is the children's book that teaches you what fiction can do to your heart, and for many readers it was the first step toward Harry Potter. The friendship between Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider, and Charlotte's sacrifice to save Wilbur's life, introduces the same themes that make Harry Potter resonate: loyalty, sacrifice, and the idea that love is stronger than death. White writes with a simplicity that is profoundly moving, and if you are looking for books to share with younger readers before they are ready for Hogwarts, Charlotte's Web is the perfect bridge. It teaches the same lessons Harry Potter teaches, just more gently.

This beloved book by E. B. White, author of Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, is a classic of children's literature that is "just about perfect." This high-quality paperback features vibrant illustrations colorized by Rosemary Wells! Some Pig. Humble. Radiant. These are the words in Charlotte's Web, high up in Zuckerman's barn. Charlotte's spiderweb tells of her feelings for a little pig named Wilbur, who simply wants a friend. They also express the love of a girl named Fern, who saved Wilbur's life when he was born the runt of his litter. E. B. White's Newbery Honor Book is a tender novel of friendship, love, life, and death that will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come. This edition contains newly color illustrations by Garth Williams, the acclaimed illustrator of E. B. White's Stuart Little and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, among many other books.

George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones is where many Harry Potter fans went when they outgrew young adult fiction and wanted fantasy that did not pull its punches. Martin builds a world as detailed and immersive as Rowling's, but the rules are different: heroes die, villains sometimes win, and the moral clarity of Harry Potter gives way to a grey landscape where everyone is both good and terrible depending on the chapter. The reading experience, the complete immersion in a fully realised world with dozens of characters you care about, is the same. If you loved Harry Potter for the world-building and want to see what fantasy looks like when it refuses to protect its characters, Westeros is waiting.

Long ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister forces are massing beyond the kingdom’s protective Wall. To the south, the king’s powers are failing—his most trusted adviser dead under mysterious circumstances and his enemies emerging from the shadows of the throne. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the frozen land they were born to. Now Lord Eddard Stark is reluctantly summoned to serve as the king’s new Hand, an appointment that threatens to sunder not only his family but the kingdom itself. Sweeping from a harsh land of cold to a summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, A Game of Thrones tells a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; a child is lost in the twilight between life and death; and a determined woman undertakes a treacherous journey to protect all she holds dear. Amid plots and counter-plots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, allies and enemies, the fate of the Starks hangs perilously in the balance, as each side endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.

Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring is the beginning of the greatest fantasy epic ever written, and its relationship to Harry Potter is ancestral. Frodo Baggins must carry the One Ring to Mount Doom, a quest that will cost him everything, and Tolkien writes his journey with a grandeur and emotional weight that Rowling clearly studied. The fellowship, a group of diverse characters united by a common cause, is the template for Dumbledore's Army and the Order of the Phoenix. If you loved the later Harry Potter books for their darkness, their sense of sacrifice, and their willingness to let beloved characters die for something greater than themselves, The Lord of the Rings is where Rowling learned how to do that. It is longer, denser, and more linguistically demanding than Harry Potter, but the payoff is immense.

Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power – the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring – the ring that rules them all – which has fallen into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.