Witches have been having a big moment in pop culture lately, from the big screen (“Wicked”) to the small (“Agatha All Along”). But you’ll find the most thoughtful, colorful depictions of witchery in novels, going back decades.
I love reading about witches — and was eager to write about them in my new book, “Lessons in Magic and Disaster” — because it’s an identity that feels subversive and tied to a rebel glamour. Wizards attend fancy boarding schools: Witches gather furtively in the woods. Here are a few of my favorite, witchiest books.
Lolly Willowes
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
In Warner’s 1926 satirical fantasy, Laura Willowes leaves the obligations of her family home in London for the tiny village of Great Mop. She’s content with her freedom until her nephew Titus moves in, forcing her back into the role of “useful and obliging” Aunt Lolly. Desperate to drive Titus back to London, Laura makes a pact with Satan and becomes a witch — and soon discovers that many of her neighbors are witches, too. Things go swiftly downhill for Titus from there — curdled milk, a plague of wasps — while Laura discovers, to her delight, that witches “do not mind if you are a little odd in your ways.” Satan proves to be a wickedly funny companion, and Lolly’s antisocial grouchiness is highly relatable.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
by Patricia A. McKillip
Sybel, a reclusive and powerful teenage sorceress, lives on a mountain with a menagerie of adorable mystical creatures. One night, a mysterious man shows up and entrusts her with Tamlorn, a baby of royal blood, and the young witch finds herself getting drawn into politics. When Tamlorn eventually comes of age and is taken away, Sybel throws herself into the search for a magical, white-winged bird called the Liralen; instead, she finds the Blammor, a creature that causes people to die of fear. McKillip’s novel, published in 1974, is a beautiful, profound fable. The more the mercurial, passionate Sybel meddles, the bigger the mess she makes — but with love and courage, things will eventually turn out all right.
Witch Week
by Diana Wynne Jones
Larwood House is a boarding school that caters in part to “witch-orphans”: children whose parents have been burned as witches in an alternate world where witchcraft is common but illegal. When someone slips a teacher an anonymous note claiming that there are witches among the students, it throws the school into turmoil — particularly for two bullied children, Nan and Charles, who are coming to terms with the fact that they are indeed magical. Loosely connected to Jones’s Chrestomanci series, this book brilliantly captures the ordinary evils and pervasive anxiety of living under totalitarianism, while also weaving in plenty of Jones’s trademark charm.
The Wee Free Men
by Terry Pratchett
Nobody wrote witches like Pratchett, and the first book in his Tiffany Aching series — part of the larger Discworld saga — is my absolute favorite. As a fledgling witch, Tiffany learns to control her magic and work with others, and along the way she makes a lot of the mistakes you’d expect from a young person coming into great power. But “The Wee Free Men” is also about Tiffany processing her grief after the death of two elders, and reconciling with mortality is a huge part of the story. All the while, she’s accompanied by tiny, rambunctious fae creatures (the “wee free men” of the title) whose beliefs about death are decidedly odd. Pratchett uses his signature warmth and humor to wonderful effect here.
Read our guide to Pratchett’s work.
A Discovery of Witches
by Deborah Harkness
Harkness, a real-life historian, writes engagingly about Diana Bishop, the scion of two powerful witch families who has turned her back on magic to pursue an academic career. While doing research at Oxford University, Diana uncovers a long-lost magical manuscript, which awakens her powers and attracts the attention of a charismatic vampire named Matthew Clairmont. Diana’s desire to hold onto academic respectability — even as a key primary source in her research turns out to be a secret magical book — feels utterly believable, and the confluence of magical politics, historical texture and romance provides an endless series of delights.
The Memory Garden
by Mary Rickert
People are always throwing shoes at Nan’s house because she’s the town witch; she repurposes the footwear as planters in her garden. But one day, something more unexpected arrives on her doorstep: a baby. Nan raises the little girl, Bay, as her own, and before she knows it her daughter is a teenage witch, Nan is being forced to confront her own mortality and surprise houseguests are showing up in the garden. Long before “cozy fantasy” became a genre, Rickert wove this irresistibly gentle tale of an unconventional family full of secrets. This book did more than any other to shape how I think about witches. (As with the two novels below, I’ve praised “The Memory Garden” before.)
The Women Could Fly
by Megan Giddings
Like Jones, Giddings crafts a world with stringent anti-witchcraft laws — although, unlike in “Witch Week,” nobody here is actually getting burned at the stake. In Giddings’s version, any woman who remains unmarried past her late 20s is charged with witchcraft, and the handful of women who do register as witches have their movements restricted. Jo’s mother, a suspected witch, has been missing for years. When she is finally declared legally dead and her will is unsealed, it contains instructions that send Jo on a quest to a mysterious island. Giddings’s dystopia feels not just plausible but familiar and lived-in: a world in which all women are tightly controlled, but the burden falls heaviest on Black women. This is one of my favorite books from the last five years.
Read our review.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
by Sangu Mandanna
In this cozy paranormal romance, witches have a complex society full of hierarchy and rules — and the biggest rule is that, in order to keep their existence secret, they must stay away from each other. Mika Moon breaks with this policy when she agrees to go to the isolated Nowhere House to teach three volatile young orphaned witches. There’s a cast of quirky characters and a spiky romance, but the core of this book is Mika’s learning to take care of these kids and struggling with the notion that power inevitably means loneliness. “Alone is how we survive,” Mika’s been taught, but she comes to learn that “alone is not how we live.”
This was one of our favorite romance novels of 2022.
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