Books with witches can be magical, so here are some of our favorites! Witches come in all shapes, sizes, abilities, and powers. Their powers can be hidden or hard to control. But their stories are to die for. These are our top 50 spellbinding picks to get you hooked on the genre.
Romance Books With Witches
Demon From the Dark – Kresley Cole
Malkom Slaine is tormented by his sordid past and racked by vampiric hungers, he’s pushed to the brink by the green-eyed beauty under his guard.
Carrow Graie, a witch, is hiding her own sorrows, she lives only for the next party or prank. Until she meets a tortured warrior worth saving.
Dark Witch – Nora Roberts
Iona Sheehan has always felt a powerful connection to Ireland. So when her beloved grandmother confesses an extraordinary family secret. She can’t resist visiting County Mayo to discover the truth for herself.
But Iona’s arrival is no accident. The three cousins have each inherited a dangerous gift from an ancestor known as the Dark Witch. And they are about to discover that some old legends can return to haunt the present.
Witch Fire – Anya Bast
Jack is a powerful witch with the ability to command fire and is anything but normal. As the head of a security detail for The Coven, Jack has been assigned to watch over Mira.
She is a natural born witch with the ability to call the air. And although she is unaware of her talent, a group of renegade witches has discovered her existence and are determined to steal her power–and her life.
My Commander – Alanea Alder
When the topic of grandchildren comes up during a weekly sewing circle the matriarchs of the founding families seek out the witch Elder to scry to see if their sons have mates. They are shocked to discover that many of their son’s mates are out in the world and are human!
Fearing that their future daughter in laws will end up dead before being claimed. Providing them with grandchildren to spoil, they convince their own mates that something must be done. After gathering all of the warriors together in a fake award ceremony. The witch Elder casts a spell to pull the warrior’s mates to them, whether they want it or not.
Magic in the Wind – Christine Feehan
Ever since Damon Wilder sought refuge in Sea Haven, he’s heard the same breathless rumor pass the lips of nearly every local in the sleepy coastal town.
Even the wind seems to whisper her name. A reverie so powerfully suggestive that it carries the curious Damon to Sarah’s clifftop home. And seeks to shelter him there.
Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night – Nora Roberts
Considering his history with Mariketa the Awaited, Bowen MacRieve of the Lykae clan should be pleased when dark forces unite against her.
Yet when he discovers how vulnerable the beautiful witch truly is. He finds himself using all his strength and skill to keep her alive.
Infinity – Maggie Shayne
By dark of night and shining moon…It beats still… in the box where it has been imprisoned all this time. She intends to replace it in his magnificent chest and bring him back to life. Back to her.
That he died hating her, blaming her, is something she’ll worry about later.
Blood Magick – Nora Roberts
Branna O’Dwyer has a rich and remarkable life. But Branna’s own heart remains closed. To protect herself and the man she loves from a terrible threat.
She reached out once to Finbar Burke – and it almost destroyed them both. Fin and Branna have both inherited a gift for magic, but Fin shares his blood with an old and terrible enemy. And so the two friends have kept their distance, both secretly yearning for the impossible.
Magic By Moonlight – Maggie Shayne
She wasn’t supposed to touch the Book of Shadows… But she can’t seem to help herself from just leafing through the mystical pages. She find the ancient protection spells amusing. Wouldn’t it be nice if life was really that easy.
For kicks, she reads one outloud…
And a strong, handsome, very confused hero steps right out of history and into her aunt’s living room.
By Magic Beguiled – Maggie Shayne
As a child Adam found respite from his father’s cruelty in the woods around their home. During one of his forest adventures, he crawled through tunnel. He emerged into another world, a magical world. Where a beautiful fairy child splashes in an enchanted pool.
It was just imagination… Or so Adam tells himself as an adult. Until he finds a painting of that same crystal-strewn glade. That same glistening pool, the same mysterious girl splashing in its waters.
Urban Fantasy Books with Witches
Dead Witch Walking – Kim Harrison
Vampires rule the darkness in a predator-eat-predator world rife with dangers beyond imagining—and it’s Rachel Morgan’s job to keep that world civilized.
A bounty hunter and a witch with serious sex appeal and an attitude, she’ll bring ’em back alive, dead . . . or undead.
Magical Midlife Madness – K. F. Breene
Eager for a fresh start, I make a somewhat unorthodox decision and move to a tiny town in the Sierra foothills. It’s just temporary, I tell myself. It’ll just be for a while.
That is, until I learn what the house really is, something I never could’ve imagined.
Thankfully forty isn’t too old to start an adventure, because that’s exactly what I do. A very dangerous adventure that will change my life forever. I have a chance to start again, and this time, I make the rules.
Shadow Witch – Kim Richardson
Okay, so I’m in trouble. Big trouble. I’m broke. Worse, my boyfriend of five years just dumped me. What do I do? I move in with my three eccentric aunts in their family home, Davenport House. Sounds exciting, only this massive farmhouse likes to eat men.
If I were a regular human, I would have run out screaming like a banshee. As a witch—I do absolutely nothing. Hey, maybe they deserved it?
Grave Witch – Kalayna Price
As a private investigator and consultant for the police, Alex Craft has seen a lot of dark magic. But even though she’s on good terms with Death himself, nothing has prepared her for her latest case.
When she’s raising a “shade” involved in a high profile murder, it attacks her, and then someone makes an attempt on her life.
Every Which Way But Dead – Kim Harrison
Witch and former bounty hunter Rachel Morgan’s managed to escape her corrupt company. And survive living with a vampire, start her own runner service, and face down a vampire master.
But her vampire roommate Ivy is off the wagon, her human boyfriend Nick is out of town indefinitely. And it doesn’t sound like he’s coming back while the far-too-seductive vampire Kisten is looking way too tempting. And there’s a turf war erupting in Cincinnati’s underworld.
Books with Witches That Inspired Adaptions
Practical Magic – Alice Hoffman
As children, sisters Gillian and Sally were forever outsiders in their small New England town. Teased, taunted and shunned for the air of magic that seems to sparkle in the air around them. All Gillian and Sally ever wanted was to get away. And eventually they do – one marries, the other runs as far from home as she can manage.
Years later, however, tragedy will bring the sisters back together. And they’ll find that no matter what else may happen, they’ll always have each other.
A Discovery of Witches – Deborah Harkness
When historian Diana Bishop opens an alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library, it’s an unwelcome intrusion of magic into her carefully ordered life. Diana is a witch of impeccable lineage. The violent death of her parents while she was still a child convinced her that human fear is more potent than any witchcraft.
Now Diana has unwittingly exposed herself to a world she’s kept at bay for years; one of powerful witches, creative, destructive daemons and long-lived vampires.
Wicked – Gregory Maguire
An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn’t so wicked after all.
Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Gregory Maguire just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature.
The Witches – Roald Dahl
Grandmamma loves to tell about witches. Real witches are the most dangerous of all living creatures on earth. There’s nothing they hate so much as children, and they work all kinds of terrifying spells to get rid of them.
Her grandson listens closely to Grandmamma’s stories—but nothing can prepare him for the day he comes face-to-face with The Grand High Witch herself!
The Witchews of Eastwick – John Updike
Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious.
Their happy little coven takes on new, malignant life when a dark and moneyed stranger, Darryl Van Horne, refurbishes the long-derelict Lenox mansion and invites them in to play. Thenceforth scandal flits through the darkening, crooked streets of Eastwick—and through the even darker fantasies of the town’s collective psyche.
Beautiful Creatures – Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she’s struggling to conceal her power, and a curse that has haunted her family for generations.
But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.
Witches of East End – Melissa de la Cruz
Freya, Ingrid and Joanna Beauchamp love their sleepy life in North Hampton. A new engagement, an interesting job, a happy home – life is perfect. Yet these women are harbouring a centuries-old secret: they are powerful witches forbidden to practise magic.
But when a young woman turns up dead, it soon becomes clear to the Beauchamp women that it’s time to come out of hiding and fight the dark forces that are brewing.
Young Adult Books with Witches
Witch Child – Celia Rees
When Mary sees her grandmother accused of witchcraft and hanged for the crime, she is silently hurried to safety by an unknown woman. The woman gives her tools to keep the record of her days – paper and ink.
Mary is taken to a boat in Plymouth and from there sails to the New World where she hopes to make a new life among the pilgrims. But old superstitions die hard and soon Mary finds that she, like her grandmother, is the victim of ignorance and stupidity, and once more she faces important choices to ensure her survival.
The Bone Witch – Rin Chupeco
When Tea accidentally resurrects her brother, Fox, from the dead, she learns she is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy means that she’s a bone witch, a title that makes her feared and ostracized by her community.
But Tea finds solace and guidance with an older, wiser bone witch, who takes Tea and her brother to another land for training.
Labyrinth Lost – Zoraida Cordova
Alex is a bruja, the most powerful witch in a generation…and she hates magic.
At her Deathday celebration, Alex performs a spell to rid herself of her power. But it backfires. Her whole family vanishes into thin air, leaving her alone with Nova, a brujo boy she’s not sure she can trust, but who may be Alex’s only chance at saving her family.
How to Hang a Wicth – Adriana Mather
After Sam’s father is hospitalised, she has to move from New York to Salem with her stepmother, Vivian.
Unfortunately, Sam is related to Cotton Mather, one of the men responsible for the Salem Witch Trials, and to say she feels unwelcome in Salem is an understatement…
These Witches Don’t Burn – Isabel Sterling
Dealing with her ex-girlfriend, Veronica, is the least of Hannah’s concerns when a terrifying blood ritual interrupts the end-of-school-year bonfire.
Evidence of dark magic begins to appear all over Salem, and Hannah’s sure it’s the work of a deadly Blood Witch. The issue is, her coven is less than convinced, forcing Hannah to team up with the last person she wants to see: Veronica.
Historical Books with Witches
The Witch’s Daughter – Paula Brackston
In the spring of 1628, young Bess Hawksmith watches her mother’s body swing limp from the Hanging Tree.
She knows that only one man can save her from the same fate – Gideon Masters, the Warlock. She knows, too, that his help comes at a steep price.
The Heretic’s Daughter – Kathleen Kent
When Martha is accused of witchcraft, and the whisperings in the community escalate, she makes her daughter promise not to stand up for her if the case is taken to court.
As Sarah and her brothers are hauled into the prison themselves, the vicious cruelty of the trials is apparent, as the Carrier family, along with other innocents, are starved and deprived of any decency, battling their way through the hysteria with the sheer willpower their mother has taught them.
The Crucible – Arthur Miller
The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity.
But that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft—and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond – Elizabeth George Speare
Alone and desperate, Kit Tyler has been forced to leave her beloved home on the island of Barbados. So she joins a family she has never met on the unfamiliar shores of colonial Connecticut.
Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place. Just when it seems she must give up, she finds a kindred spirit.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane – Katherine Howe
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned home near Salem, she can’t refuse.
As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane.
The Witches of New York – Ami McKay
Witches Adelaide Thom and Eleanor St Clair have opened a tea shop in Manhattan specialising in cures, palmistry and potions. When an enchanting woman called Beatrice joins the witches as an apprentice, she soon proves indispensable, but her new life is marred by strange occurrences.
She sees things no one else can see. She hears voices no one else can hear. Has she been touched by magic or is she simply losing her mind?
The Witch’s Trinity – Erika Mailman
When a visiting friar suggests that witchcraft is to blame for their failing crops, Irmeltrud sees it as an opportunity to get rid of her burdensome mother-in-law, Güde.
Frustrated with having to feed the old woman who brings nothing to the table, she is quick to point the dreaded finger of suspicion. Güde has three days to clear her name, or be led to the stake . . .
Circe – Madeline Miller
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child — not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother.
Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power — the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Wicca Non-Fiction Books with Witches
The Green Witch – Arin Murphy-Hiscock
In The Green Witch, you will learn the way of the green witch, from how to use herbs, plants, and flowers to make potions and oils for everyday healing. As well as how crystals, gems, stones, and even twigs can help you find balance within.
You’ll discover how to find harmony in Earth’s great elements and connect your soul to every living creature. The green witch focuses on harmony, healing, and balance with the Earth, but also with humanity and yourself.
Witchery – Juliet Diaz
In this book, Indigenous Taino Bruja and Seer Juliet Diaz guides you on a journey to connect with the Magick within you. She explains how to cast off what doesn’t serve you, unleash your authentic self, and become an embodiment of your truth.
You’ll also learn the skills and techniques you need to build your own Magickal craft and practice. This book isn’t like any other witchy book out there, Juliet teaches you how Magick really works.
Toil & Trouble – Augusten Burroughs
For as long as Augusten Burroughs could remember, he knew things he shouldn’t have known. He manifested things that shouldn’t have come to pass. And he told exactly no one about this, save one person: his mother.
His mother reassured him that it was all perfectly normal, that he was descended from a long line of witches. And that this family tree was filled with witches. It was a bond that he and his mother shared. Until she left him…
The Penguin Book of Witches – Katherine Howe
From a manual for witch hunters written by King James himself in 1597, to court documents from the Salem witch trials of 1692, to newspaper coverage of a woman stoned to death on the streets of Philadelphia while the Continental Congress met.
The Penguin Book of Witches is a treasury of historical accounts of accused witches that sheds light on the reality behind the legends.
A Storm of Witchcraft – Emerson W. Baker
Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers–mainly young women–suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters.
Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down those responsible for the demonic work. The resulting Salem Witch Trials, culminating in the execution of 19 villagers, persists as one of the most mysterious and fascinating events in American history.
Horror Books with Witches
Hex – Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s beds for nights on end.
So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she’s there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.
The Witching Hour – Anne Rice
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery–aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches–finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.
He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
Dreams in the Witch-House – H.P. Lovecraft
The shadow of New England’s witch-hunting past hangs over many of the tales, as in ‘The Shunned House’ and ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’, in which malevolent spectres return to haunt the region.
Others, such as ‘From Beyond’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’, depict the catastrophic results when cosmic channels of time and space are opened, while stories such as ‘Polaris’ and ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath’ portray the downfall of mythical civilizations.
Conjure Wife – Fritz Leiber
Ethnology professor Norman Saylor is shocked to discover that his wife, Tansy, has been putting his research on “Conjure Magic” into practice. She only wants to protect him from the other spell-casting faculty wives who would stop at nothing to advance their husbands’ careers.
But Norman, as a man of science, demands she put an end to it. And when Tansy’s last charm is burned . . . Norman’s life starts falling apart.
The Croning – Laird Barron
Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization.
Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret of The Croning.
Hag – Kathleen Kaufman
Spanning centuries of human history, these daughters of the lowland hag, the Cailleach, must navigate a world filled with superstition, hatred, violence, pestilence, and death to find their purpose.
With pasts half remembered and destinies denied, the daughters of Cailleach are women with uncanny, and often feared, abilities to heal, to see the future and to cause great destruction and pain when threatened.
Prey – Graham Masterton
Recently divorced, David Williams takes a job restoring Fortyfoot House, a dilapidated 19th-century orphanage, hoping to find peace of mind and get to know his young son. But then he hears the scratching noises in the attic. And he sees long-dead people walking across the lawn.
Does Fortyfoot House exist in today, yesterday, or tomorrow – or all three at once? Only one thing is certain – it is a house with a dark secret that threatens to send David’s world hurling into a living nightmare. A nightmare that only David himself can prevent – if he can escape the thing in the attic.
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