Books like “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone”
What to read after “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone” by J. K. Rowling: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Ged, a gifted goatherd, is sent to the school for wizards on Roke to learn magic. A spell of vanity releases a shadow he cannot name, and he must travel across Earthsea to face it and become whole.
Every year two children are taken to the School for Good and Evil, one to train as a hero and one as a villain. Best friends Sophie and Agatha are sure they know which is which, but the school has its own plans for them.
Harry Crewe, newly orphaned, travels to a remote outpost on the Darian border to live with her brother. Corlath, king of the Free Hillfolk, carries her away from the fort, and she finds an old magic waking in her blood. Caught between two peoples, she must decide where she belongs.
Morrigan Crow is blamed for every misfortune and is marked to die on her eleventh birthday. Instead she is spirited away to the secret city of Nevermoor to compete for a place in an exclusive society, against rivals and a curse that still hunts her.
On his eleventh birthday, Will Stanton learns that he is the last of the Old Ones, born to hold back the Dark. As midwinter closes over the Thames valley, he must gather the six Signs of Light before the Rider and his powers can rise. A tale of the Light's long war against the Dark.
Sara Crewe arrives at a London boarding school from India, rich and generous, and becomes the most popular girl there. When her father loses his fortune, the headmistress turns her into a servant. Sara keeps her dignity and imagination alive while a secret from next door slowly comes to light.
Rose Hathaway is a dhampir, trained to guard her best friend Lissa, a Moroi vampire princess. After two years on the run, they are returned to St. Vladimir's Academy, where Rose falls for her instructor and the school's wards hide dangerous secrets.
Sold and condemned, the girl Nona Grey is saved from the gallows by the Convent of Sweet Mercy, where young women are trained as warriors and killers. Between lessons in blade and poison she makes friends and enemies and a promise, while the past that marked her comes looking.
Kvothe, once a renowned magician and musician, tells a scribe the truth behind his own reputation. His story moves from a travelling troupe to a brutal city and the magic school where he learned far too much.
Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is sent to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy, where proper young ladies learn dance, dress and etiquette, and also lock-picking, information gathering and the quieter arts of espionage. A stolen prototype and a plot against a schoolmate pull Sophronia and her new friends into danger.
Children who have returned from magical worlds struggle to readjust, so Eleanor West's home gives them somewhere to belong. When Nancy arrives from the Halls of the Dead, she finds the school hiding its own dangers and a mystery that threatens her new friends.
After a boy dies in a fire she cannot explain, Lucinda is sent to Sword & Cross, a bleak reform school in Savannah. There she is drawn to Daniel, a distant student she somehow knows. The shadows she has seen since childhood, and Daniel's secrets, point to a love older than her life.
Miles Halter leaves his quiet Florida home for a boarding school in Alabama, drawn by the last words of famous people. There he joins a tight circle of friends, falls for the reckless Alaska Young, and is forced to reckon with loss and guilt.
Percy Jackson, a twelve-year-old who keeps getting expelled, learns he is a demigod and is accused of stealing Zeus's master bolt. With Annabeth and Grover he crosses America to return it, facing monsters and gods to stop a war on Olympus.
Taran, an assistant pig-keeper who wants only to be a hero, loses the oracular pig Hen Wen and follows her into the land of Prydain. With a bard, a princess and a creature named Gurgi, he stumbles into a war against the Horned King.
Eragon finds a polished blue stone in the mountains, and it hatches into a dragon. Chosen as her rider, he is hunted by the king's servants and must leave his village to learn the ways of the Dragon Riders and join the rebels.
Anna is sent to a boarding school in Paris for her senior year, though she barely speaks French and misses home. There she falls in with a circle of friends and develops feelings for Étienne, a charming classmate who is already taken. Their closeness makes staying just friends harder every day.
At Devon, a New England boys' boarding school, quiet Gene roommates with charismatic Finny during the summer before their senior year. Their friendship grows intense and competitive as the war outside presses closer, until one reckless afternoon changes both their lives.
Lyra Belacqua lives among the scholars of Oxford in a world where every person has an animal companion called a daemon. When children begin to disappear, she travels north with a mysterious instrument and a fierce armored bear to uncover a conspiracy about the substance called Dust.
After his family is murdered, a toddler wanders into a graveyard, where its ghostly residents adopt and raise him as Nobody Owens. He grows up among the dead while the killer who took his family is still searching for him.
Corin Cadence enters the Serpent Spire to earn a magical attunement and learn what happened to his missing brother. He leaves with an unusual power, then studies at Lorian Heights Academy, chasing forbidden knowledge and building a team around his strange abilities.
The Scholomance is a magic school with no teachers, where students learn spells while monsters pick them off between lessons. Galadriel 'El' Higgins, feared for the dark power a prophecy says she will wield, has to survive to graduation and the hungry things waiting in the dark.
Quentin Coldwater is recruited to a hidden college of magic in upstate New York, where years of study leave him restless and still searching for meaning. When he and his friends find a way into Fillory, the enchanted land from his childhood books, its dangers turn out to be very real.
Davian is an Augur, born with powers forbidden since the old war. When the laws of the Venerate turn against him, he flees with his friends in search of the man who might explain why the Augurs fell. What he finds tests everything he was taught to believe.
What should I read after “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone”?
Start with “A Wizard of Earthsea”, “The School for Good and Evil”, “The Blue Sword”: they are the closest to “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone” these are Boarding School, Magic Academy, Chosen One), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “The School for Good and Evil”, “Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow”, “Vampire Academy”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
