HBO’s Harry Potter reboot premieres Christmas Day. Here’s where longtime readers and brand-new fans should go next, from tween-friendly magic schools to grown-up dark academia.
For thirteen years, “what do I read now?” has been the automatic question the moment someone finishes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. HBO is about to hand that same question to an entirely new generation. The network’s adaptation, titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for its first season, premieres Christmas Day 2026, with Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton, and Alastair Stout starring as Harry, Hermione, and Ron. John Lithgow is Dumbledore, Nick Frost is Hagrid, Janet McTeer is McGonagall, and Paapa Essiedu is Snape. Eight seasons are planned, one per book, which means the specific ache this franchise causes — a castle full of secrets, a friend group worth going to war for — is about to be very fashionable again.
That creates two very different audiences hunting for a next read at the same moment. There’s the person who grew up with the books, reread them a dozen times, and wants something that respects how much they’ve outgrown the target age range. And there’s the eight- or nine-year-old who’s about to watch a kid their own age get a letter from an owl and is going to want more of that feeling immediately. The list below tries to serve both, starting with the books built for a reader who just finished their first fantasy series and getting progressively older, stranger, and more morally complicated from there. Pick an entry point based on who’s actually doing the reading.
Also Read: Harry Potter Books in Order
10 Books to Read While You Wait for Hogwarts to Come Back
1. The Lightning Thief
- Kids & tweens
If someone in your house just watched a kid get pulled out of a miserable home into a world of monsters and destiny, start here. Percy Jackson discovers he’s the son of Poseidon, gets shipped off to Camp Half-Blood, and spends a summer dodging Greek monsters alongside two friends who balance him out the exact way Ron and Hermione balance Harry. Riordan wrote Percy as dyslexic and ADHD on purpose, for his own son, and it shows in how naturally the book treats being wired differently as a strength instead of a flaw. It’s funnier than Harry Potter, faster-paced, and just as clear-eyed about how useless the adults in charge can be when it actually matters. Also Read: Percy Jackson Books in Order
2. Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow
- Kids & tweens
Morrigan Crow has spent her whole life blamed for every bad thing that happens in her town, because she was born on an unlucky day and is, by local law, cursed. Then a strange man named Jupiter North spirits her away to the hidden city of Nevermoor and enters her into a competition for a place in the elite Wundrous Society, without mentioning that she doesn’t actually have any magic to compete with. It has the wonder of walking into Diagon Alley for the first time, a mentor as delightfully unbothered as Hagrid, and a slow-burn mystery about Morrigan’s real ability that carries a reader comfortably through all four books currently out.
3. Amari and the Night Brothers
- Kids & tweens
Amari’s older brother has always been the golden kid of the family, so when he vanishes without explanation, nobody believes her that something’s wrong. Then she gets a video message inviting her to a summer program run by the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, an agency her brother apparently worked for in secret. Amari is the only kid there without money, without a legacy, and with a magical ability everyone else finds frightening, which makes her outsider status land harder than Harry’s ever did. This one leans into the class tension Harry Potter always flirted with but rarely dug into, while still being a genuinely fun summer-camp-for-secret-agents story.
4. The Marvellers
- Kids & tweens
Ella Durand is the first non-Marveller ever admitted to the Arcanum Training Institute, a magic school that floats above the clouds and draws its curriculum from real-world magic traditions across Africa, Asia, and the Americas rather than one invented system. Her first days are sensory overload in the best way — new foods, new spells, new social rules to learn on the fly — which is exactly the feeling of Harry’s first walk through Diagon Alley, just filtered through a much wider cultural lens. A great pick for a reader who loved the school itself more than the villain plot.
Also Read: Harry Potter Movies in Order
5. The Mysterious Benedict Society
- Kids & tweens
Four kids answer a strange newspaper ad, pass a series of increasingly bizarre tests nobody else can solve, and get recruited by an eccentric old man to go undercover at a school that’s secretly brainwashing its students. There’s barely any magic in it — the closest thing to a wand is Reynie Muldoon’s habit of noticing what everyone else misses — but the found-family dynamic between four mismatched kids who’d do anything for each other is doing the same emotional work as Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Good for a reader who’s realizing the trio mattered to them more than the spells did.
6. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
- All ages
Long before Hogwarts, four siblings stepped through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia and found a world at war, an enigmatic protector in the lion Aslan, and the particular thrill of discovering that the ordinary world has a door in it somewhere. It’s shorter and gentler than Harry Potter, and openly allegorical if you go looking for it, but the basic shape — an ordinary kid, a secret world, a looming darkness, a mentor who isn’t quite what they seem — is the shape Rowling was still working in decades later. A natural pick for a younger reader, or for an adult who wants to trace the family tree Harry Potter grew out of.
7. Northern Lights
- Teens & up
Lyra Belacqua grows up half-feral in the halls of an Oxford college, in a world where every person’s soul walks beside them as a talking animal called a daemon. When children start disappearing, Lyra heads north with a truth-telling device no one else can read, and the trilogy gets progressively darker and more philosophically ambitious from there — this is the series that picks a real fight with organized religion and free will, rather than just handing readers an evil wizard to defeat. It was adapted for television by the BBC, which makes it an easy sell to anyone about to settle into a new prestige fantasy series. Start younger readers with Northern Lights and let them decide for themselves when they’re ready for how heavy it eventually gets.
8. Howl’s Moving Castle
- Teens & up
Sophie Hatter gets turned into an old woman by a witch’s curse and, with nothing left to lose, marches into the walking castle of the vain, terrifying wizard Howl and appoints herself his cleaning lady. What follows is warm, funny, and gently chaotic in exactly the way Hogwarts life gets chaotic between the actual plot points — a house full of strange rules, a temperamental fire demon standing in for a ghost in the walls, and a hero whose flaws are the entire point of him. The Studio Ghibli film is gorgeous, but the book is funnier and weirder, and it’s a rare fantasy where the adults are just as messy as the teenagers.
9. A Deadly Education
- Teens & adults
Here’s the pitch: what if Hogwarts genuinely wanted its students dead? El Higgins attends the Scholomance, a magic school with no teachers, monster-infested hallways, and a mortality rate that would get any real institution shut down, and she’s spent her whole life fighting the fact that her natural talent runs toward mass destruction instead of anything useful. It’s Harry Potter run through a cynicism filter — funny, mean, and sharply aware of how a “chosen one” story looks from the point of view of the kid nobody wants to be friends with. Best for teen and adult readers who’ve read enough magic-school books to want one that’s in on the joke.
10. The Magicians
- Adults
Quentin Coldwater is a miserable, over-achieving Brooklyn teenager obsessed with a series of children’s fantasy novels about a magical land called Fillory — and then he gets into Brakebills, a real college of magic hidden in upstate New York. The Magicians is what happens when you take that premise seriously enough to ask what these kids actually do after graduation, and the answer involves depression, addiction, bad relationships, and the slow realization that being magic doesn’t fix anything about being a person. It’s written for adults, with sex, drinking, and a level of despair Rowling never touched, and it’s the sharpest answer out there to the specific grief of loving a children’s series and growing up faster than it did.
Three More, If You’ve Already Read Everything Above
- Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo — Yale’s secret societies practice real, blood-soaked magic. The darkest, most R-rated pick on this list.
- The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani — twin fairy-tale academies, one training heroes and one training villains, for readers who want the school without giving up the fairy tale.
- Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson — a girl bound to a library of magical grimoires that occasionally try to kill her. Cozy and dark in equal measure.
Whichever one you start with, there’s a decent argument for rereading the actual Harry Potter books before December, too. HBO’s slower, season-per-book pace gives this new cast more room to sit inside Hogwarts than any of the films ever had, and the first book hits differently once you remember exactly how much Rowling packed into it. Christmas is closer than it feels.
